Morisawa Family Residence

A Meiji Landowner's Estate, Registered Down to the Wash Basins

The Morisawa Family Residence (森澤家住宅, Morisawa-ke jūtaku) is a middle Meiji-period landowner's estate in Doi, Aki City, Kochi Prefecture, whose thirteen components, from the main house and gate to its walls, stone ramparts and water basins, were registered together as a Registered Tangible Cultural Property on 10 November 2005. Their registration numbers run without a break from 39-0196 to 39-0208.

The plot is long and narrow on a north-south axis. The main house sits in the middle with its ridge running east to west, and a formal Shikidai entrance opens at the centre of its south face. Buildings hold three of the four corners: the gatehouse to the southeast, the North Storehouse to the northwest, the annex to the northeast. The fourth corner, to the southwest, is closed by an earthen wall that turns along two sides. Walk the outline of the property and you are walking along its buildings and walls.

Around the main house cluster the small structures that kept the household running. A well house stands just to the north. A toilet and bathhouse line the western boundary, a barn stands on the northwest edge, and a pickling room sits on the southeast boundary. Inner and outer walls, a perimeter stone rampart and stone-built basins opening onto a water channel complete the set.

Most historic houses in Japan survive as a main house and a gate, perhaps a storehouse. Here the toilet, the pickling room and the washing places were registered on the same day as the reception rooms. That is what makes the Morisawa Family Residence worth understanding as a whole: you can follow, on one plot, how a Meiji landowner's household divided its work among its buildings.

Thirteen Registrations, Four Kinds of Structure

The thirteen break down into eight buildings (main house, nagayamon gatehouse, North Storehouse, annex, barn, pickling room, well house, and toilet and bath), three walls (inner wall, tsuiji earthen wall and outer wall), one site of water basins and one perimeter stone wall. The Agency for Cultural Affairs dates every item to the middle Meiji period, the later decades of the nineteenth century. All thirteen were registered under the same criterion, contribution to the historic landscape of the country, and the Kochi Prefecture list of registered buildings records them together under Doi, Aki City.

The Agency's short descriptions assess each structure in different terms, and those terms sketch the character of the estate. The main house is valued as the large principal dwelling of a Meiji landowner, with nine floored rooms. The gatehouse, with its slatted Musha-mado windows and Tosa lime-plaster walls, presents a residence of standing. The North Storehouse carries four courses of water-shedding tiles on its plaster walls, a design the Agency describes as regional. The south run of the earthen wall, with river cobbles worked into its clay above a stone base, is singled out for its distinctive appearance.

The vocabulary shifts from scale to status to regional character because the thirteen do different jobs. Some make the formal front, some hold the family's stores, some handle water and fire, and some simply enclose the ground. It is the combination that records how a landowning household of the period lived.

Reading the Layout

The Morisawa Family Residence faces south. The gatehouse stands at the southeast corner looking south, and the main house's formal entrance also opens to the south. From the southwest corner the earthen wall runs up the west side and along the south side, where it becomes a 15-metre stretch, 1.8 metres high, studded with river stones. The ground between gate and entrance was the formal space where guests were received.

Along the east side runs the perimeter stone wall, which doubles as the foundation for the buildings above it. The gatehouse, the pickling room and the annex all stand on this edge, and the outer wall, set on top of the stonework, fills the gaps between them. The annex presents a projecting lattice window on its north face and slatted windows on its east face, so even the outward-facing walls were given some presence. A water channel runs along the east side. Two of the basins open supply and drain holes toward it, and a small stone bridge crosses the channel beside the northern one.

The north half is the back of the house. The well house stands right behind the main house. A board fence encloses roughly the eastern half of the main house's north side, and an earthen wall encloses the annex's south garden; together these form the registered inner wall. The North Storehouse faces south from the northwest corner, rice in its east half and tools in its west half, and nearby on the boundary the two-storey barn faces east.

West of the main house is the service line. A toilet and a bathhouse stand side by side on the boundary, the bath fired from its own small stoking room. Seen from the main house, with its earth-floored working area to the east, the well, the basins, the bath and the toilet lie in different directions. Drawing water, washing, heating water and sanitation each had a place of their own.

The District of Doi

Doi takes in Doi Kachū, the samurai quarter laid out in the Edo period by the Gotō family, senior retainers of the Tosa domain, around the site of the Warring States-period Aki Castle. Doi Kachū was selected as an Important Preservation District for Groups of Traditional Buildings on 9 July 2012. Aki City identifies its hallmarks as walls of river cobbles and old roof tiles bedded in red clay, and roofs laid with left-hand and right-hand tiles according to the prevailing wind.

The Morisawa Family Residence is registered as a landowner's estate, not as a samurai house. Even so, its river-stone wall and the rain-shedding tiles of its storehouse show the same concern that runs through the district: protecting buildings in a place of strong wind and driving rain.

Visiting and Getting There

No public opening of the Morisawa Family Residence is announced in any Aki City or Aki City Tourism Association material (checked 25 September 2026), and the owner is not named in the Agency for Cultural Affairs database. Please do not enter the grounds; view the exterior from outside only. Take photographs from the public road and do not aim a lens through the gate or into the buildings.

If anything is visible from outside, it will be the structures on the perimeter: the gatehouse and earthen wall on the south, the stone wall and outer wall on the east, and the outer walls of the annex at the northeast corner. The well house, the toilet and bath and the inner wall stand well inside the plot and cannot realistically be seen.

The nearest station is Aki on the Tosa Kuroshio Railway's Gomen-Nahari Line. According to the Aki City Tourism Association, the Doi samurai quarter is about 5 minutes from Aki Station by car or about 10 minutes by rental bicycle. Doi Kachū has no visitor parking, and Aki City asks visitors to use the Mizonobe Park car park just south of the preservation district. This is a lived-in residential area, so do not park on the street.

For a look inside a house in Doi, the city opens the Nomura Family Residence to the public free of charge, from around 8 a.m. to around 5 p.m. every day of the year. It is a late Edo-period samurai house with a toilet and bath building, barn, well and walls, and it lets you see from the inside the same arrangement found at the Morisawa Family Residence: a main house ringed by service buildings.