Yoneda Family Residence

About the Yoneda Family Residence

The Yoneda Family Residence (米田家住宅, Yoneda-ke Jūtaku) is a private estate in Uyama, Sumoto City, on Awaji Island in Hyogo Prefecture, whose 8 buildings, all dated to 1941 (Showa 16), were listed together as Registered Tangible Cultural Properties on 2 March 2004.

What sets the estate apart is that single date. The Agency for Cultural Affairs gives the same year for every building: the main house, a south-facing pavilion called the shinden, a 2-storey guest hall, a bathhouse with its own tea room, a Western-style office wing, a storehouse, a narrow storage shed and a small shrine to the household deity. Many old Japanese estates grew piece by piece over generations. Here the whole household was laid out in one building campaign, and it has survived as a set.

The munafuda, or ridge tag, of the main house names the designer as 山本豊圓 (Yamamoto) and the master carpenter as 斎藤三吉 (Saitō). Since all eight buildings share a date, the same team may have worked across the estate, but the records name them only for the main house.

In its descriptions, the Agency calls the main house, guest hall and bathhouse sukiya in character, meaning the refined residential manner that grew out of tea-house design (sukiya-zukuri). It notes modern touches in the shinden and a Western exterior of scratch tiles on the Western-style house. The Agency also presents the estate as a glimpse of how a large household in this region lived.

How the Estate Is Laid Out

Pieced together from the Agency's descriptions, the eight buildings of the Yoneda Family Residence sit as follows.

East side: main house and lower storage shed

The main house stands toward the east of the plot, facing west, with an entrance porch under its own hip-and-gable roof pushed out in front. Behind it on the east, the long, thin lower storage shed runs parallel to the house.

Centre: the shinden pavilion

The shinden stands near the middle of the estate, facing south, and is joined to the main house by a covered corridor.

North of the shinden: guest hall and bathhouse

The guest hall, 2 full storeys high, stands north of the shinden. The bathhouse lies to its east, and another corridor links the two.

South-west: the Western-style house

The Western-style house stands toward the south-west, facing the main house across the grounds.

North-west: storehouse and shrine

The storehouse occupies the north-west part of the plot and faces south. The shrine sits just west of it in the north-west corner, also facing south. Both rest on bases of finely cut granite blocks.

Corridors join the main house to the shinden and the guest hall to the bathhouse, so the living and guest buildings form a cluster through the middle and north of the site, while the storehouse and shrine are tucked into the north-west corner. The Western-style house, with its entrance hall, office and reception room, sits apart on the front side of the main house. It may have been where business callers were received, but we found no document describing how the buildings were used, so this reading is our own.

What Was Registered

The eight buildings of the Yoneda Family Residence were registered on 2 March 2004 in the 41st round of national registrations, with the official notice following on 29 March. They carry consecutive registration numbers from 28-0142 to 28-0149, and all were listed under the same criterion: buildings that serve as a model of good design.

• Main House (28-0142): wooden, single-storey, tiled roof, building area 124 square metres
• Shinden Pavilion (28-0143): wooden, single-storey, tiled roof, building area 50 square metres
• Guest Hall (28-0144): wooden, 2 storeys, tiled roof, building area 124 square metres
• Bathhouse (28-0145): wooden, single-storey, tiled roof, building area 42 square metres
• Western-Style House (28-0146): wooden, single-storey, tiled roof, building area 95 square metres
• Storehouse (28-0147): earthen-walled dozo construction, 2 storeys, tiled roof, building area 38 square metres
• Lower Storage Shed (28-0148): wooden, single-storey, tiled roof, building area 7.9 square metres
• Shrine (28-0149): wooden, single-storey, copper-sheet roof, building area 1.3 square metres

Added together, the eight buildings cover about 480 square metres. The largest, the main house and the guest hall, take up 124 square metres each; the shrine takes up just 1.3. Registering everything from the family's living quarters down to the household shrine under one criterion reflects a view of the estate as a single whole.

The list of nationally registered properties published by the Hyogo Prefectural Board of Education records the Yoneda Family Residence as privately owned and includes seven entries, from the main house to the lower storage shed; the shrine does not appear. The Agency's database and Cultural Heritage Online both list all eight.

Visiting and Getting There

The Yoneda Family Residence is a private home. As of October 2026 we found no announcement of public openings or tours, and the grounds and interiors are closed to visitors. If you look at the buildings from outside, stay off the property and be considerate of the people who live there.

Exterior photographs of all eight buildings can be viewed in the Agency for Cultural Affairs' Database of National Cultural Properties.

The address is 2-5-4 Uyama, Sumoto. Awaji Island has no railway, and Sumoto Bus Center, served by highway buses from the Kobe and Osaka areas, is the usual starting point for getting around the island. The residence lies about 0.9 kilometres west-north-west of the bus center in a straight line. This figure is an estimate taken from a map; there is no official access guide.

About the Name

Yoneda-ke Jūtaku simply means "Yoneda family residence." In the national database each building is registered under the estate name followed by its own name, such as 米田家住宅主屋 for the main house or 米田家住宅祠 for the shrine. The building names are read shinden (寝殿), kyakuden (客殿), yudono (湯殿), shimo-naya (下納屋) and hokora (祠). Published records from the Agency and Hyogo Prefecture say nothing about the Yoneda family's trade or history.