Iwasaki Family Residence

The Farmhouse Where Mitsubishi's Founder Was Born

Iwasaki Family Residence (岩崎家住宅, Iwasaki-ke Jūtaku) is the birthplace of Iwasaki Yatarō in Inokuchi, Aki City, Kochi Prefecture, a farmstead centred on a thatched main house built around 1795, whose seven structures were registered as Registered Tangible Cultural Property on 28 April 2010. Local signs and tourist guides call it Iwasaki Yatarō Seika, "Iwasaki Yatarō's birthplace". It lies about 3 km north of central Aki, in the Ichinomiya district, where fields and houses still share the ground.

Yatarō was born here on 9 January 1835, in what was then Inokuchi village in Aki District. According to the Aki City Tourist Association, the family's ancestors served the warlord Aki Kunitora in the sixteenth century, passed under Chōsokabe rule, and after the Yamauchi clan took over Tosa turned to clearing land and farming. The main house is credited to Yatarō's great-grandfather, Yajiemon, who is said to have paid for it by selling the family's gōshi rank, the status of a rural samurai.

Yatarō left for Edo to study in 1854 and later ran trading operations for the Tosa domain. In 1870 the domain's Osaka trading house became the Tsukumo Shōkai under his management, and in 1873 it was renamed Mitsubishi Shōkai, the company from which today's Mitsubishi group descends.

A Nikkei report from March 2010 states that the family moved away in 1871 and that the house has not been lived in since. It remains in private hands, owned by the Iwasaki family, and is opened to the public through the owners' goodwill, with the interiors kept closed.

Seven Registrations Spanning More Than a Century

The seven registered structures are the Main House, East Storehouse, West Storehouse, Guardhouse, Toilet, Hokora Shrine and Earthen Wall, carrying consecutive registration numbers 39-0253 to 39-0259. Japan's Council for Cultural Affairs recommended them in March 2010, and registration followed on 28 April the same year.

Their dates run across more than 110 years. The Main House came first, around 1795. The toilet followed in the late Edo period and the earthen wall in the early Meiji period; the East Storehouse dates from 1886, the West Storehouse from 1897, the guardhouse from the late Meiji period and the small shrine from 1908. Walk the grounds and you can read the sequence: a modest Edo-period farmhouse, then storehouses and outbuildings added one at a time as the family's fortunes changed.

Two different registration criteria were applied. The Main House alone was registered as a model of design; the other six were registered for their contribution to the historic landscape. The Agency for Cultural Affairs describes the house as a fine example of a small eighteenth-century farmhouse, and credits the storehouses and wall with shaping the rural scene through their white Tosa plaster and walls of stone and red earth.

The Mitsubishi connection shows in the details. The Aki City Tourist Association notes that the ridge-end tiles of the storehouses west of and behind the main house carry the sangaibishi, the Iwasaki family crest of three stacked lozenges, and a diamond crest also decorates the front of the shrine. Mitsubishi Heavy Industries traces the company's three-diamond mark to a combination of that crest with the three-oak-leaf crest of the Yamauchi, lords of Tosa.

How the Grounds Are Laid Out

All seven structures stand on a single plot, within a few dozen metres of one another. At the centre, facing south, is the thatched Main House. Behind it runs the East Storehouse on an east-west axis, and west of that the West Storehouse on a north-south axis. A roof bridges the gap between the two, so the north side of the grounds reads as one continuous run of white plastered wall.

From the north-east corner of the East Storehouse, the earthen wall runs east and then turns south along the edge of the fields. Locally it is called ishiguro, a wall of mountain stone packed with red clay. The small shrine sits at the centre of the northern boundary, facing south. The guardhouse occupies the south-east corner, and the toilet stands south of the Main House, at what was the south-east corner of the grounds in the late Edo period.

Start at the Main House. In front of it lies a small garden of set stones that, by tradition, the boy Yatarō arranged in the shape of the Japanese archipelago. From there go round the back to the two storehouses and their crested tiles, head east to see the stone footing of the wall, and finish with the shrine, the guardhouse and the toilet. A full circuit takes about 30 minutes.

Beside the car park stands a bronze statue of Yatarō, 3.3 m tall on a pedestal of 1.1 m. It was put up in 1985 to mark the 150th anniversary of his birth and moved to the front of the birthplace in March 2015, and it makes a useful landmark when you arrive.

Visiting and Getting There

Admission to the Iwasaki Family Residence is free. The grounds are open from 9:00 a.m. to 4:30 p.m., with the gate closing at 5:00 p.m., and are closed on Mondays (the following day when Monday is a public holiday) and over the New Year period. The gate may also stay shut in severe weather.

The rooms cannot be entered, but visitors may step into the earth-floored entrance of the Main House and look in from there. Fire, smoking and food are not allowed anywhere on the grounds, and visitors are asked not to bring dogs or other pets. Bicycles and motorcycles should be left in the car park. Press and other filming needs the owners' permission, arranged through Aki City's Commerce, Tourism and Fisheries Division (tel. 0887-35-1011). General enquiries go to the Aki Tourist Information Center (tel. 0887-34-8344).

The nearest station is Aki on the Tosa Kuroshio Railway's Gomen-Nahari Line, about 3 km away: roughly 10 minutes by car or taxi, or about 20 minutes on a rental bicycle. The city's Genki Bus (Ichinomiya loop and Ogawa lines) stops at Ichinomiya, about a 5-minute walk from the house. Drivers should allow about 50 minutes from Nankoku Interchange on the Kochi Expressway, or about 25 minutes from Geisei-nishi Interchange on the Kochi Tobu Expressway. Parking is free.