Former Hirose Family Residence

What the Former Hirose Family Residence is

The Former Hirose Family Residence (旧広瀬家住宅, Kyū Hirose-ke Jūtaku) stands at Uehara in Niihama, Ehime Prefecture, and its seven buildings were designated an Important Cultural Property on 30 May 2003. The house was built by Hirose Saihei, the manager who modernised the Besshi copper mine and became the first director-general of the Sumitomo enterprise.

Saihei was born in 1828 in Yatsuo, a village in Ōmi Province that is now part of Yasu in Shiga Prefecture. At nine he was taken to Besshi by an uncle who worked at the mine. At twenty-eight he was adopted into the Hirose family of the Sumitomo branch house in Iyo, and from there rose through the mine's management.

The property occupies an alluvial fan that looks north over the city. The main house was first put up in 1877, about four kilometres downhill at Kubota in the former village of Kaneko, by the master carpenter Manabe Gihei. When it was moved to the present site in 1887 it was turned to face east.

A gate opens at the eastern edge of the grounds. A lane runs west from it to the main house, with the New Guest Wing joined to the south by a covered passage, a detached wing to the northwest, and the Inui Storehouse at the far northwestern corner. The long Hardware and Rice Storehouse runs east to west along the northern boundary, with the gatekeeper's lodge beside the main gate. These seven structures make up the designation. The whole programme of moving and building was directed by Yagi Jinbei the Second.

Why all seven buildings were designated together

Two criteria were applied to the Former Hirose Family Residence: excellence of design, and distinctiveness of regional or school character. What tipped the balance was completeness. A residence assembled in a single campaign during the 1880s and 1890s still holds every element from the entrance gate to the storehouses, and apart from parts of the Hardware and Rice Storehouse and the gatekeeper's lodge, later alteration has been slight.

The second factor is the plan itself. Both the main house and the New Guest Wing contain several rooms arranged around views, so the building worked as a place to receive guests as much as a place to live. Provincial houses of this scale that combine both functions and survive intact are uncommon for the Meiji period.

Three further structures were designated as tsuketari, or appendages: the New Storehouse with the West Reception Annex, the rear gate, and the rickshaw shed. A Munafuda, the wooden ridge tag from the New Guest Wing, was included as a fourth item. It records the year 1889 and names Yagi Jinbei as the carpenter, which is why the dating of that wing rests on documentary rather than stylistic evidence.

The garden around the buildings is protected under a separate system. Known locally as Hirose Park, it became a prefectural Place of Scenic Beauty in 1968 and a national one on 13 February 2018 under the name Former Hirose Garden. The prefectural designation was released when the national one took effect. Buildings and garden are therefore held under two different categories on one piece of ground.

Highlights of the Former Hirose Family Residence

The room to look for is Bōenrō, a nine-mat chamber in the northeast corner of the upper floor. The name means roughly "gazing at the smoke", the smoke being that of the Besshi mine, and Saihei coined it when the house still stood at Kubota. An inner veranda wraps the east and north sides, and the city spreads out below. The finish is plain throughout, except for the balusters facing north and east, which are Western in profile. That one detail dates the room more sharply than anything else in it.

The main house covers 409.82 square metres. On the ground floor an earth-floored Doma runs along the north side, and the raised part holds nine rooms in a three-by-three grid. The northeast corner is an eight-mat entrance hall with a Shikidai step, followed south by an eight-mat anteroom and an eight-mat principal room. Between the six-mat and eight-mat rooms toward the south sits a fireplace that opens on both sides. Tatami and a hearth of that kind rarely share a room, and the combination reads as stranger in person than in photographs.

The New Guest Wing measures 11.9 metres along the ridge by 7.9 metres deep. A fifteen-mat room faces a ten-mat anteroom to its north, with an Engawa veranda on three sides. The principal room has a raised two-mat Tokonoma alcove and a biwa-doko shelf beside it, a Nageshi rail running round the walls, and carved Ranma transoms and worked Kugikakushi nail covers. The ceiling is a Saobuchi-tenjō. A tea room sits at the northwest corner and a bath house at the end of a corridor from the southern veranda. The manner is Sukiya-zukuri, and the openings toward the garden are noticeably larger than anything in the main house.

The detached wing is long and narrow, 19.7 metres by 3.9 metres. Its upper floor centres on Shisuirō, an eight-mat room with a north-facing veranda and alcove.

Two storehouses carry the designation. The Inui Storehouse is a two-storey Dozo-zukuri building of 14.8 by 6.6 metres roofed in Hongawarabuki tiles. The Hardware and Rice Storehouse is a single long range; a prayer tablet inside the rice section is dated to the first month of 1839, which makes it the oldest securely dated fabric among the seven buildings.

The front gate is a single-bay Yakuimon under Sangawara-buki tiles, with a wicket door in the northern wing wall. It was built around 1890, as was the gatekeeper's lodge. The length of the lane between that gate and the front door tells you the standing of the household before you have seen a single room.

Visiting the Former Hirose Family Residence

The house is open to visitors as the Kyū Hirose-tei, one half of the Hirose Historical Memorial Museum, and the interiors can be walked through. Hours are 9:30 a.m. to 5:30 p.m., with last entry at 5:00 p.m. It closes on Mondays, on the day after a public holiday unless that day is a Sunday, and over the new year period.

Admission is 550 yen for an individual, and the ticket also covers the exhibition hall next door. Groups of twenty or more pay 440 yen. Visitors under eighteen and students in high school or higher education enter free. Niihama residents aged sixty-five and over, and holders of a disability certificate together with one carer, pay 270 yen. Tickets are sold at either building.

Photography is allowed. The city actively offers the house for pre-wedding portraits and for shichi-go-san family photographs, and anyone planning that kind of session is asked to give the date and the number of people in advance. The building cannot be booked exclusively, so a photo party is treated like any other visitor. There is no changing room, and smoking and eating are not permitted anywhere on the site.

By car it is about twenty minutes from JR Niihama Station and about fifteen minutes from the Niihama interchange on the Matsuyama Expressway. A car park for both ordinary and large vehicles sits on the northern side of the grounds. The city publishes driving directions only, so visitors without a car should plan on a taxi from JR Niihama Station.

The park land that forms the national scenic site can be walked free of charge outside the ticketed area. Circling the turtle pond before going inside makes the relationship between garden and house much easier to read, and the cherry trees there are the reason most local visitors come in early April.

Opening hours and admission were checked against the Niihama city website on 4 September 2026.