Sawai Family Residence (Tanabe Town, Tsuzuki District, Kyoto

The Sawai Family Residence: A Deputy's House in Ōsumi

In the ninth month of Genbun 5 (1740), the head of the Sawai family put his intention to rebuild the family house into writing and sent it up the chain of authority. A second petition followed a month later, and account books listing the costs of construction and the gifts received during the work were kept through the following year. Those papers survive. They were designated together with the building when it became an Important Cultural Property in 1975, and they allow a visitor to follow, almost month by month, how a mid-Edo deputy's residence took shape in the village of Ōsumi, in what is today Kyotanabe, Kyoto Prefecture.

The house stands among ordinary farmland, yet it was never an ordinary farmhouse. Its owners served as local deputies, and the building was made to receive guests of rank. That difference is written into every part of it.

From Vassals to Village Deputies

The Sawai trace their line to retainers of the Sasaki Rokkaku, a warrior house that held sway over southern Ōmi Province from the Kamakura through the Sengoku periods. After their lord Sasaki Yoshikata was defeated by Oda Nobunaga, the family gave up the sword and settled into farming here at Ōsumi around the turn of the seventeenth century.

Their fortunes shifted again in 1732 (Kyōhō 17). In that year the family entered the service of Donge-in, an amamonzeki convent in Kyoto headed by women of imperial and aristocratic birth. Donge-in held land across roughly a third of the Ōsumi district, and the Sawai were appointed its resident deputies, responsible for administering that territory. A house that received tax records, petitioners, and officials on behalf of a convent connected to the court needed rooms that a working farm did not. The rebuilding of 1740 to 1741 answered exactly that need.

Why the House Was Designated

The Sawai Family Residence was registered as a National Important Cultural Property on 23 June 1975. Two qualities set it apart. The first is the building itself, a single structure measuring 20.2 meters along the front and 12.6 meters in depth, built in the irimoya hipped-and-gabled style under a thatched roof, with tiled eaves running along all four sides. A separate reception wing, the tsunoya, projects to the northwest in a smaller wing 9.0 by 6.0 meters, its own thatched roof joining the main one to form an L when seen from above.

The second quality is documentary. The full set of construction papers, the petitions and account books mentioned at the start, was designated alongside the house. Wooden buildings of this age commonly come down to us with their dates uncertain, reconstructed from style and from inscriptions on hidden timbers. Here the paperwork removes the guesswork. The Sawai residence is one of the few mid-Edo dwellings whose making can be read directly from its owners' own records, and that pairing of building and archive is what gives the designation its weight.

Reading the Building

The house faces east. Along the front, three entrances sit in a row: the earthen-floored doma entry that any farmhouse would have, then a formal genkan, and beside it a shikidai, the low stepped platform reserved for receiving important visitors. A farmer had no use for a shikidai. Its presence at the threshold announces the household's official role before a guest sets foot inside.

Past the entrances the plan divides sharply. The southeast portion holds a broad doma of about four by four-and-a-half bays, framed with thick pillars and heavy beams in a deliberately massive construction. Stand in this space and the carpentry reads as strength. The raised-floor rooms wrap around it to the west and north, and there the mood changes entirely.

From the shikidai entrance, two rooms run in sequence toward the tsunoya wing: a tsugi-no-ma antechamber and an oku-no-ma inner room, an arrangement built for graduated levels of welcome. These reception rooms were finished in the sukiya manner associated with the tea aesthetic. The carpenters left out the nageshi tie-beams that formal halls usually display, used pillars with the bark still on them and slender round logs for the rafters, and finished the walls in a reddish clay. The result is restrained rather than grand. A veranda runs along three sides of the wing, so light and the surrounding garden reach the rooms from several directions.

The contrast is the point. One household, under one roof, kept a farmer's working hall and a courtier's drawing room and asked its visitors to pass from one to the other.

Taken Apart and Restored

For more than two and a half centuries the house was never fully dismantled. That changed in January 2004, when conservators began the first complete disassembly and repair in the building's history. The work ran for over three years and finished in March 2007, returning the residence to its original 1740s form.

The timber for the repair carries a story of its own. In October 2004, Typhoon No. 23 felled large numbers of pines along Amanohashidate, the celebrated sandbar on the Sea of Japan coast. Nineteen of those fallen pines were brought to Kyotanabe and worked into the great beams and other members of the Sawai house, so that wood from one of the country's most famous landscapes now carries the load of a deputy's residence inland. The same conservation also confirmed a detail of authorship: the master carpenter who built the Sawai house went on to raise the Isa Family Residence, another Important Cultural Property, near the Nagare-bashi bridge in Yawata in 1734. Visitors who see both can recognize a single hand at work.

The Black Gate and a Brief Imperial Tenant

One feature on the grounds points to a later chapter. After the Kinmon Incident of 1864, when fighting broke out around the Hamaguri Gate of the Kyoto palace, Donge-in needed shelter away from the city. The convent took up residence at the Sawai house for about five years. The black gate at the property is remembered as a trace of that period, when a country deputy's home briefly served as the temporary seat of an imperial convent.

Around the Residence

The Sawai house sits in the Ōsumi district, a place with a long memory. According to ancient record, the Yamato court resettled people of the Hayato from Ōsumi in southern Kyushu to this part of Yamashiro, and the area still keeps the Ōsumi Hayato-mai, a ritual dance tied to its shrines. Tsukiyomi Shrine lies about 850 meters from the house, and Amatsu Shrine is a short distance away as well; both make a natural pairing with a visit.

Kyotanabe is tea country, the northern reach of the region marketed as Ocha no Kyoto, and it holds one of Kyoto's notable Zen temples, Ikkyū-ji, properly Shūon-an, the retirement temple of the eccentric monk Ikkyū. The temple is also the source of Ikkyū-ji nattō, a dry, salty fermented soybean once made in local households. A half day in the area can easily fold together the residence, a shrine or two, and the temple.