Main House of Sasaki Nobutsuna's Birthplace

A Meiji Townhouse Facing the Old Tokaido

The Main House of Sasaki Nobutsuna's Birthplace (佐佐木信綱生家主屋, Sasaki Nobutsuna seika shuoku) is an 1868 townhouse in Ishiyakushi, Suzuka City, Mie Prefecture, entered on Japan's register of Tangible Cultural Properties as a structure on 28 October 2011. It turns its front to the east, toward the roadbed of the old Tokaido highway, across a frontage of about 12 metres and a depth of about 10 metres.

The poet and philologist Sasaki Nobutsuna (佐佐木信綱, 1872 to 1963, also written 佐々木信綱) was born in this house on 3 June 1872, the eldest son of Sasaki Hirotsuna, a scholar of national learning who had studied under Ajiro Hironori. Nobutsuna began reciting the Man'yoshu and Saigyo's Sankashu at his father's insistence at the age of five by the traditional count, wrote his first tanka at six, and in December of that same year left Ishiyakushi when the family moved to Matsusaka. Six years of a life that ran to ninety-two were spent here. Everything else, including the monumental Kohon Man'yoshu of 1924 to 1925 and the first Order of Culture, awarded to him in April 1937, happened elsewhere.

That imbalance is part of what makes the house interesting. It is not a shrine to a career. It is an ordinary post-town dwelling that happens to have produced an extraordinary tenant, and it survives because Suzuka City chose to keep it standing.

The surname is worth a word of its own. Nobutsuna was registered at birth under the common spelling 佐々木, with the repetition mark. In 1903, travelling in China, he had calling cards printed in Shanghai on crimson Chinese paper, and they came back reading 佐佐木信綱 with the character repeated in full. He liked the look of it and used that form on his publications from then on. Both spellings refer to the same man, and the cultural property is registered under the second.

What the Register Records

The Agency for Cultural Affairs lists the building as registration number 24-0109, granted in the seventy-first round of registrations, under the criterion of being a model of design. Its recorded form is a single-storey timber structure with a tiled roof and a building area of 121 square metres. The Agency's own descriptive note qualifies that summary immediately: the house is a tsushi nikai, a low half-storey under the roof used for storage rather than living, which older Japanese practice counts as single-storey even though a loft plainly exists above the ground floor.

The dating is layered, and the register's two date lines do not agree with each other. The Japanese-era line reads: built in the first year of Meiji, work in the mid-Meiji period, relocated in 1970, repaired in 2008. The Western-calendar line gives 1868, then 1883 to 1897, then enlarged in 1970, then repaired in 2008. Suzuka City's own account supports the first reading. The house was moved in 1970 and opened that December as the nucleus of the Sasaki Nobutsuna Memorial Museum.

Registration as a Tangible Cultural Property is a lighter instrument than designation as an Important Cultural Property. It applies to buildings roughly fifty years old or more, obliges the owner to notify the government before altering them, and is meant to keep useful buildings in use rather than freeze them. Around a hundred thousand structures now carry it. The Main House earned its place on the list for a specific reason: Ishiyakushi has very few surviving machiya, and this is one of them.

Ishiyakushi was the forty-fourth of the fifty-three Tokaido stations. It came late, established in 1616, fifteen years after the courier system began, because the gap between Yokkaichi and Kameyama was awkwardly long. Before that it was farmland called Takatomi. The town never prospered. Pilgrims bound for Ise turned off the highway at Hinaga-oiwake to the north or the eastern fork at Seki to the south, and Ishiyakushi sat on neither route. Of roughly 180 households, only about thirty ran inns; the rest farmed. In 1747 the town petitioned for relief from its post-station duties. What finally spared the streetscape was an accident of modern road building: when Route 1 was laid out in 1949 it bypassed the old highway to the east, and the narrow original street was left alone.

Reading the Plan

Machiya are read from the entrance backwards, and this one rewards the exercise. Along the south edge of the building runs a tori-doma, an earth-floored passage that goes from the street straight through to the rear of the plot. It was the working spine of the house: you could walk in from the road with muddy feet, do the day's business, and never step onto a raised floor.

North of the passage, the raised living floor is divided into two rows of three rooms. The room farthest back in the northern row is the omozashiki, the formal reception room, fitted with a toko (the alcove usually rendered in English as tokonoma) and a tokowaki, the subsidiary bay of shelving beside it. That arrangement, the good room placed at the quiet back corner away from the street and the passage, is standard for the type and tells you exactly how the family ranked its own space.

Outside, the roof is gabled and laid with sangawara, the interlocking pantile that spread through ordinary Japanese building in the eighteenth century and replaced heavier, more expensive tiling. Tiled pent roofs run across the front and the back. Stand in the garden and the proportions read as low and long rather than tall, which is the whole point of the tsushi nikai: enough headroom above to store goods, not enough to invite a second-floor rent or a second-floor tax.

The house does not stand alone. A small plastered storehouse sits directly behind it to the north, and the reading room of the Ishiyakushi Bunko, the library Nobutsuna gave his home town in 1932 to mark his sixtieth year, stands to the east along the old highway. All three were registered on the same day in October 2011. Eight months earlier, in February of that year, the birthplace had become the first building in Suzuka City to be designated an Important Landscape Structure under the city's own ordinance.

Planning a Visit

The house is part of the Sasaki Nobutsuna Memorial Museum complex, run by Suzuka City, and admission is free. Viewing hours are 10:00 to 16:00. The site closes on Mondays, Tuesdays and the third Wednesday of the month, with the qualification that it opens when only the Monday falls on a public holiday, and it closes over the new year period. Hours have been revised in recent years, so the city's own page is the figure to trust.

One practical point matters more than any other. Visitors view the Main House from the garden rather than walking through it. The building is opened up so that the interior is visible from outside, which means the doma, the room divisions and the reception room can all be seen, but this is not a house you tour room by room. The adjacent Reference Hall, a two-storey concrete building completed in May 1986, is where you go indoors: its ground-floor gallery shows Nobutsuna's manuscripts, hanging scrolls, personal effects and the first Order of Culture itself.

No photography rule is published for the grounds. Ask at the reception desk before taking pictures, particularly of the exhibits next door.

Getting there is easiest by bus. From Kintetsu Suzuka-shi Station, take the C-Bus to the Sasaki Kinenkan stop, about two minutes on foot from there. From Kintetsu Yokkaichi Station or Kintetsu Hiratacho Station, Sanco buses reach the same stop, about five minutes on foot. From JR Kawano Station the C-Bus takes you there in two minutes' walk, or you can walk the whole way in about thirty. By car it is roughly twenty minutes from the Suzuka interchange on the Higashi-Meihan Expressway.

Come in late April or early May if you can. Around a hundred deutzia shrubs, the u-no-hana of Nobutsuna's much-loved song Natsu wa Kinu, are planted around the birthplace garden and in front of the library, and they flower from the end of April into mid-May. The city's chronology dates the lyric to somewhere between 1896 and 1901, hedging the year because the sources do. Ishiyakushi-ji, the temple that gave the post town its name and that Hiroshige drew in his Tokaido series, is a short walk south along the same old road.