Hanawa Family Residence (Iwama Town, Nishiibaraki District, Ibaraki Prefecture)

Two roofs that were once two houses

The Hanawa Family Residence (塙家住宅, Hanawa-ke Jūtaku) is a late Edo period farmhouse of 2 buildings at Yasui in Kasama City, Ibaraki Prefecture, designated an Important Cultural Property in 1976 (Shōwa 51).

Its official name carries a parenthesis, Iwama Town, Nishiibaraki District, Ibaraki Prefecture, which records the municipality as it stood on the day of designation. Iwama merged into Kasama City in 2006, so the address on a map today reads 2009 Yasui, Kasama City, while the register keeps the older wording.

The designation covers 2 buildings. The main house measures 13.5 m along the ridge by 9.3 m in depth and dates from the middle of the 18th century. Beside it stands the earthen-floored block, 13.2 m by 6.7 m, entered from the gable end and assigned to the late Edo period, between 1751 and 1829. Both are Yosemune-zukuri with Kayabuki roofs.

The Hanawa were not ordinary cultivators. The family is said to have come to Shishido in 1602 (Keichō 7) in the service of the Akita clan, holding the post of nandoyaku, the officer in charge of the household stores. When the Akita were transferred again to Miharu in 1645 (Shōhō 2), the Hanawa are recorded as having stayed behind and returned to farming, and they served for generations as warimoto nanushi, the headman who supervised a group of villages. The scale and layout of the house match that standing.

Why the Hanawa Family Residence is designated

Approach the Hanawa Family Residence from the lane and it looks like a magariya, the L-shaped farmhouse familiar across eastern Japan, with one continuous thatched roof turning a corner. That reading is wrong, and the correction is the reason the house is designated an Important Cultural Property.

The building was originally of the bunmune type, in which the earthen-floored working half and the raised floored half are constructed as two separate houses standing side by side. Only later were the two roofs thatched into a single sweep. The Agency for Cultural Affairs describes the Hanawa Family Residence as the sole surviving example in the Kantō region of a bunmune farmhouse in which the earthen-floored block and the floored block are of the same date, rather than one having been added to the other generations later.

The evidence sits in the framing, and Kasama City points to two places to find it. One is the line of posts along the boundary between the two halves, together with the roof structure above it, which belongs to two independent buildings rather than one. The other is at the head of the sasu rafters of the kamaya, the earthen-floored block, where the joints cut for a purlin of its own roof survive unused. The gap between the two houses was where a large gutter once ran, hollowed from a single trunk, catching the rain that poured off both slopes into the valley between them.

The type is associated with the warm coastal belt along the Kuroshio current, which makes an inland example in northern Ibaraki genuinely unexpected. Why the form travelled here has not been settled.

What to look for on site

Stand where the two roofs meet. The valley between them is the seam of the whole argument, and it is the one place where a visitor can read the join without going indoors. The great wooden gutter set at that junction is the practical answer to a problem a bunmune house creates for itself, since two adjacent slopes shed an enormous volume of water into a very narrow gap. Kasama City reproduces a photograph of it under the caption of the large rain gutter at the joint.

Then look at the proportions. The main house is 13.5 m along the ridge and 9.3 m deep, while the earthen-floored block is nearly as long at 13.2 m but only 6.7 m deep, and it is entered from the gable end rather than the eaves side. Two structures of different depth, different entry and different date sit under one thatched surface. Once that is noticed, the L-shaped silhouette stops reading as a single building.

The thatch itself repays a slow look. Layer thickness at the eaves, the colour gradient from ridge to gutter and the fresh patches where sections have been renewed all tell you how the Hanawa Family Residence is being kept, because a roof of this size cannot be maintained passively. Winter and early spring, when the surrounding paddy is bare, give the clearest view of the whole roofline from the lane.

Visiting the Hanawa Family Residence

The Hanawa Family Residence is a privately owned house standing on land where the owning family live, and neither Kasama City nor the Agency for Cultural Affairs publishes opening days, opening hours or an admission fee for it. Treat it as a property to be seen from outside unless arrangements have been made in advance. Anyone hoping to look at the interior should contact the Lifelong Learning Division of the Kasama City Board of Education on 0296-77-1101 before travelling.

The house sits in farmland in the southern part of the former Iwama area. The nearest station is Iwama on the JR Jōban Line, about 10 minutes away by taxi; there is no bus that passes the site. Drivers coming from Tokyo should allow about 90 minutes on the Jōban Expressway to the Iwama interchange, then a short run on local roads.

Photography of the exterior from the public lane is unproblematic. Photographing across the boundary into the grounds, or of the interior, needs the owner's consent, and this is a residence rather than a museum, so approach it on that basis. There are no toilets, no parking area laid out for visitors and no signboard staff, so the visit is a short one, best combined with the other nationally designated properties in Kasama City.