Sameshima Hiroshi Family Residence

An Early Meiji Samurai House in Kaseda

The Sameshima Hiroshi Family Residence (鮫島博家住宅, Sameshima Hiroshi-ke Jūtaku) is an early Meiji-period samurai house in the Kaseda Fumoto district of Kaseda Takeda, Minamisatsuma City, Kagoshima Prefecture, whose main house, gate, stone wall and storehouse were entered as four Registered Tangible Cultural Property listings on 13 August 2012. It is also one of the component properties of the Japan Heritage story on the fumoto samurai quarters of Satsuma.

The Japan Heritage description puts construction at around 1877; the Agency for Cultural Affairs database gives the early Meiji period, 1868 to 1882. Either way the house went up within a few years of the abolition of the samurai class, and it follows the Edo-period layout closely. The stone walls and hedges are said to survive from before the Restoration, and the local tourism association's walking map calls the house unusually well preserved in its early Meiji state.

A fumoto was the quarter where Satsuma's rural samurai lived, set at the foot of a hill inside each of the domain's outlying districts. Kaseda's grew up around the medieval Beppu Castle and was regularised under the Shimazu, who held the area from the mid-15th century. The Sameshima Hiroshi Family Residence keeps one of those plots, with its buildings, much as a family of that rank would have arranged it.

Four Listings and How They Fit Together

The four were registered together as numbers 46-0102 to 46-0105, all under the criterion of contributing to the historic landscape. The Agency's descriptions are unusually direct about why: the main house is said to preserve the samurai-house type of Kaseda, and the stone wall, together with the inumaki podocarps planted inside it, to preserve the Kaseda style of estate enclosure.

The entrance is on the north-west. A small bracket-armed gate stands set back from the lane, with Sodobei wing fences bending away on either side and a tuff-stone wall beyond them. The wall is 2.1 metres high and runs to 49 metres, and a further length of wall stands behind the gate itself. The plastered storehouse sits in the west corner beside the entrance, and the main house stands toward the north of the lot, facing south-west.

The main house is single-storey under an Irimoya-zukuri hip-and-gable roof, with its entrance at the centre of the front and six rooms behind. The walls inside are finished in red earth plaster, and beside the alcove in the inner reception room is a window cut in the shape of a war fan. Renovations are recorded for the main house from the mid-Showa period through 1999, and for the storehouse in 1996. The tourism association's map also singles out the kitchen beams, an old inumaki podocarp and a large sweet osmanthus.

About 120 metres to the west stands the Sameshima Family Residence, a late Meiji compound with seven listings of its own. Two households of the same surname thus preserve, side by side, the samurai frontage as it was built at the beginning and at the end of the Meiji era.

The Wider District

Kaseda Fumoto was selected as an Important Preservation District for Groups of Traditional Buildings on 23 December 2019, covering 20.0 hectares. The Agency's description of a typical fumoto lot reads almost like a description of this one: a stone wall and hedge around the plot, a bracket-armed gate set back from the boundary, a garden between gate and house, and a main house placed toward the rear.

Visiting and Getting There

The Sameshima Hiroshi Family Residence is privately owned and its interior is not open to the public. Neither Minamisatsuma City nor its tourism association lists any viewing arrangements or special openings (checked September 2026). From the lane you can see the stone wall and hedge and, through the gap, the gate and its wing fences. Please stay off the property and keep photographs to the street frontage.

Kagoshima Kotsu buses from Kagoshima-Chuo Station reach Kaseda in about 55 minutes on the direct services via the Nansatsu cross-peninsula road and the Skyline, or about 1 hour 30 minutes via Ijuin. The adult fare is 1,380 yen according to the tourism association (as of October 2025). From the Kaseda terminus the house is roughly a 10-minute walk, judging by the map. Drivers can park free at Takeda Shrine at the southern end of the district and walk north.