Hirukawa Family Residence (Former Toya Family Residence)

What Is the Hirukawa Family Residence (Former Toya Family Residence)?

The Hirukawa Family Residence (Former Toya Family Residence) is a late Edo-period estate of a gōshi household in Tsuneyoshi, Osumi-cho, Soo City, Kagoshima Prefecture, whose main house, storehouse of 1867 and gate were registered as Registered Tangible Cultural Properties on August 4, 2015.

In Japanese the property is 蛭川家住宅（旧遠矢家住宅）, read Hirukawa-ke jūtaku (kyū Tōya-ke jūtaku). The name puts the present owners, the Hirukawa family, first and keeps the earlier owners, the Toya family, in brackets. Visitors will sometimes see Toya written with a macron as Tōya; it is the same family.

Tsuneyoshi lies where the Ōsumi Peninsula joins the rest of Kyushu. Under the Satsuma domain, much of the samurai class lived not in the castle town of Kagoshima but in rural settlements across the domain, as Gōshi, part-time warriors who also farmed. The Agency for Cultural Affairs describes this house as a gōshi residence below Tsuneyoshi Castle, and the prefecture's heritage encyclopedia places it in Tsuneyoshi Fumoto, the samurai quarter at the foot of the castle hill.

From the Toya Family to the Hirukawa Family

According to Soo City, the Toya line of Tsuneyoshi descends from the son of a retainer who served the warlord Shimazu Yoshihiro. The family moved to Tsuneyoshi from Yoshida in Satsuma Province once the Shōnai Rebellion, fought around Miyakonojō from 1599, had ended, and it remained there until the close of the Edo period. In the Taishō era (1912 to 1926) a member of the family served as head of Tsuneyoshi Village.

Around 1965 the house, storehouse and gate of the Hirukawa Family Residence passed to the Hirukawa family, relatives of the Toyas. The national database dates a renovation of the main house to about the same year. What that work changed is not recorded in the published sources, but the room layout described at registration is still that of a late Edo samurai house.

The Setting in Tsuneyoshi

The Hirukawa Family Residence stands at 566 Baba, Tsuneyoshi. Going by the coordinates in the heritage database, it sits about 130 meters east of the Tsuneyoshi community hall (Tsuneyoshi Chiku Kōminkan).

The wooded hill behind the hall holds the earthworks of Tsuneyoshi Castle, a medieval mountain fortress. Soo City records that the castle was besieged and surrendered during the Shōnai Rebellion in 1599, after which Terayama Hisakane became the first steward of Tsuneyoshi district. The Toya family's arrival belongs to the same period of resettlement after the rebellion.

Three Registrations

All three structures of the Hirukawa Family Residence (Former Toya Family Residence) were added to the national register in its 81st round on August 4, 2015, under the consecutive numbers 46-0116 to 46-0118. Each was registered for contributing to the historic landscape of the country. The database gives the following dates and sizes.

• Main house: late Edo period, renovated around 1965. Wooden, single-storey, tiled roof, building area 180 square meters.
• Storehouse: 1867. Wooden, tiled roof, building area 23 square meters. The structure field calls it single-storey, while the description calls it a 2-storey storehouse.
• Gate: late Edo period. Wooden, tiled roof, 1.9 meters wide.

The database spans "late Edo" as 1830 to 1868. Only the storehouse has a firm date, taken from an ink inscription on one of its roof struts, and that date of 1867 falls at the very end of the range given for the other two.

Layout of the Estate

The Hirukawa Family Residence faces south. A stone wall runs along the front edge of the plot, and the gate stands in a break in that wall.

Inside, the main house is wrapped by a veranda on its garden side. The storehouse stands to the east of the main house and faces west. In the database coordinates, all three structures lie within less than 20 meters of one another.

Visiting and Getting There

The Hirukawa Family Residence is a private home, and Soo City states plainly that it is not open to the public. Please do not enter the grounds. Photographs of the main house, storehouse and gate are published in the Agency for Cultural Affairs database, and the Soo City page adds photographs and a floor plan of the main house.

There is no railway in Tsuneyoshi. The nearest JR Nippō Line stations, such as Takarabe, are about 18 kilometers away in a straight line. By car, the Soo Yagoro interchange on the Higashi-Kyushu Expressway is about 5 kilometers to the east as the crow flies, and the Tsuneyoshi community hall is the easiest landmark. We could not confirm a bus stop or journey time from the sources checked. The lanes in the settlement are residents' everyday roads, so take care where you stop a car.