Iwase Family Residence

A Salt Merchant's Estate at the Foot of Mount Tsunoyama

The Iwase Family Residence (岩瀬家住宅, Iwase-ke Jūtaku) is the estate of a salt-producing family in Shinhamacho, Sakaide, Kagawa Prefecture, where seven buildings and structures centred on a main house built around 1890 were registered together as Registered Tangible Cultural Properties on 29 March 2019.

The property sits on the western edge of central Sakaide, at the northern foot of Tsunoyama hill. The registration covers three buildings (the main house, a later reception wing and a storehouse) and four elements of the approach: a gate, an earthen wall, a wooden fence and a pair of stone-edged planting beds. Their registration numbers run consecutively from 37-432 to 37-438.

The name is shared by several unrelated houses in Japan, including a thatched gasshō-style farmhouse in Gokayama, Toyama, and family homes in Tsuchiura, Ibaraki, and Odawara, Kanagawa. This page is about the Iwase family of Sakaide.

A Fortune Made from Salt

Sakaide grew up around its salt pans. Kume Eizaemon (also known as Kume Michikata), a surveyor for the Takamatsu domain, reclaimed a broad stretch of shore north of today's town centre as tidal salt fields, completing the East and West Ōhama fields in 1829. New salt fields kept appearing around Sakaide through the Meiji era, and salt-making on open pans continued here until 1972, when the last salt fields in Japan were retired.

The Iwase were salt producers here, and the Agency for Cultural Affairs describes their home as the kind of establishment a wealthy salt merchant would build. Public records say little more: which fields the family worked and when the business began could not be confirmed from official sources.

The buildings span about four decades. The main house dates from around 1890, the storehouse from around 1911, the reception wing, gate, earthen wall and planting beds from the late Meiji period, and the wooden fence from the early Shōwa period; the main house itself was enlarged and remodelled around 1932. Read together, they describe a household that set down its main house in the middle of the Meiji era and then added rooms, storage and a formal approach generation by generation.

How the Estate Is Laid Out

What sets the Iwase Family Residence apart is the way the walk from the street to the front door has been staged. The Council for Cultural Affairs, in its 2018 recommendation, singled out the gate, walls and stonework as the elements that give the large estate its dignity.

Coming from the street, you first meet the stone-edged planting beds, a granite-lined approach that runs north from the gate to the road. At its end, in the northeast corner of the plot and set slightly back from the boundary, stands the east-facing front gate. Plastered earthen walls extend from either side of it, enclosing the northern half of the east side of the property and the eastern half of the north side.

Inside the gate, wooden fences reach out from both sides of the main entrance to frame the forecourt. The main house stands in the middle of the plot facing east, with the two-storey reception wing attached at its northern rear corner. Behind the house is an inner courtyard, and the storehouse faces east across it.

That all four of the outer elements were registered says a good deal about how this estate is valued. Beyond the quality of individual buildings, the formal front itself, built up from gate, walls and stone, is treated as evidence of a salt family's standing.

The Seven Registered Properties

Dates and construction details follow the Agency for Cultural Affairs database.

• Main House (registration no. 37-432): around 1890, enlarged and remodelled around 1932. A single-storey hip-and-gable house with a two-storey south end.
• New Reception Wing (37-433): late Meiji period. A two-storey hipped-roof wing of formal rooms joined to the rear of the main house.
• Utensil Storehouse (37-434): around 1911. A two-storey clay-walled storehouse in the courtyard, roofed with a timber truss.
• Front Gate (37-435): late Meiji period. A yakuimon gate under a gently convex tiled roof, with a wicket door on its south side.
• Wooden Fence (37-436): early Shōwa period. Tile-capped board fences running from both sides of the main entrance.
• Earthen Wall (37-437): late Meiji period. Plastered walls on stone bases that flank the front gate.
• Stone-Edged Planting Beds (37-438): late Meiji period, altered in the early Shōwa period. Granite borders lining the approach between the road and the gate.

Some local listings, including Sakaide City's register and the Cultural Heritage Online portal, give period labels that differ from the Agency's database (one lists the main house as Taishō era, for example). This site follows the dates in the Agency's database and the 2018 recommendation.

Visiting and Getting There

The Iwase Family Residence is a privately owned home and is not open to the public. Neither Sakaide City nor Kagawa Prefecture lists open days or visitor arrangements (as of September 2026), and the grounds cannot be entered.

What you can see from outside is mainly the street-side approach. The planting-bed approach is itself private land, so view it from the public road rather than walking in. If you take photographs, do so from the road and keep windows and residents out of frame.

The house lies about 1 kilometre west of JR Sakaide Station on the Yosan Line in a straight line, roughly a 15-minute walk. There is no visitor parking; drivers will need to use one of the paid car parks in the town centre.