Hosokawa Family Residence (Nagao Town, Okawa District, Kagawa)

A Farmhouse Found by Survey in 1966

Hosokawa-ke Jutaku (細川家住宅, the Hosokawa Family Residence) at Tawa Gakuhigashi in Sanuki City, Kagawa Prefecture, is a mid-eighteenth-century thatched farmhouse designated an Important Cultural Property on 22 June 1971.

The national register still lists it under its pre-merger address, Nagao Town in Okawa District. Nagao was absorbed into Sanuki City in 2002, and the parenthetical survives in the database to distinguish this house from other designated properties bearing the Hosokawa name elsewhere in Japan. Anyone searching for it today should look for Sanuki City.

It came to official notice late. A folklore survey in May 1966 recorded the house; a follow-up survey of vernacular architecture in 1969 assessed it; the national designation followed in June 1971. Until then it was simply the home of a farming family who had worked this land for generations, standing in a valley settlement on the western slope of Mount Yahazu, close to the Tokushima boundary at an elevation of roughly four hundred metres.

The Agency for Cultural Affairs gives the main building as 12.7 metres along the ridge by 5.8 metres across, hipped and thatched, dating to around the middle of the eighteenth century. Sanuki City's own heritage guide describes the frame as six and a half ken by three ken, which comes to much the same thing. Outbuildings stand alongside it: a barn, a privy, a timber store.

The Earthen Room That Explains the Designation

The Agency's citation is brief. A representative farmhouse of the eastern Kagawa uplands, two-room parallel plan, with regional peculiarities in the handling of posts and beams that make the internal structure worth study. Unpack that and the significance becomes clearer.

The interior runs in three parts across the width: doma, doza, zashiki. The doma is the beaten-earth working floor, known here as niwa, holding the kamado stove, a larger cooking hearth and a foot-operated mortar. Beside it, raised one step, lies the doza. This is the room that matters.

A doza is not a floor in the usual sense. The earth is compacted, then covered with straw or rice husks, then topped with woven matting. People sat, ate and slept on it. The arrangement belongs to the Muromachi period, and by the eighteenth century it had largely given way to raised wooden floors elsewhere. Here it stayed, with a sunken hearth at its centre. Smoke from that hearth rose through the roof space and cured the timbers against rot and insects, which is part of why so much original fabric survives.

The zashiki beyond it has a floor of split bamboo laid as slats, called takeza. The external walls are okabe construction, with the posts buried inside the plaster rather than left exposed, and openings are few. The house was built to hold warmth on a cold hillside, not to open onto a garden.

One more feature marks the region. The thatch sweeps down almost to the ground at the eaves, a treatment known locally as tsukudare. It sheds snow, which the eastern Kagawa mountains receive in quantities the coastal plain never sees.

Visiting

The house is open to the public and admission is free. Sanuki City gives the hours as 9:00 to 16:00, closed on Mondays and from 29 December to 3 January. Enquiries go to the city's Lifelong Learning Division on 0879-26-9974. Because staffing is light, calling ahead is worth the trouble if you are driving a long way.

The interior is furnished rather than emptied. Cooking equipment, a stone mill, farm tools and household goods sit where they would have been used, and the barn next door holds implements handed down through the family. The effect is closer to a house whose occupants have stepped out than to a display case.

The setting is part of the visit. The house stands between the Maeyama Ohenro Exchange Salon and Okuboji, the eighty-eighth and final temple of the Shikoku pilgrimage, on a road that once carried salt from Shido toward Awa. The Tawa district was called Gaku-mura until the Kan'ei era of the early seventeenth century. Pilgrims walking the last stretch to Okuboji pass reasonably close, though the house sits off the main route and up a narrow lane.

There is a car park a short walk below. The approach path is narrow and rural, so sensible shoes are advisable, and in warm months the usual caution about wildlife on country paths applies. Photography of the exterior presents no difficulty; for the interior, follow any notices on site.

Combining the house with Okuboji makes an unhurried half-day in the eastern mountains, well away from the Setouchi coastal circuit that carries most visitors to Kagawa.