Nasu Family Residence (Shiiba Village, Higashiusuki

A House Twenty-Five Meters Long and One Room Deep

The Nasu Family Residence runs about twenty-five meters from one gable to the other, yet it stands barely eight and a half meters deep. Four rooms sit shoulder to shoulder in a single line behind one unbroken veranda, with an earthen-floored work area at the eastern end. That long, shallow footprint is not an accident of taste. It is the shape mountain builders arrived at in Shiiba, where flat land is scarce and a house had to be fitted onto a narrow shelf of hillside, stretched sideways rather than pushed back into the slope.

The village of Shiiba sits deep in the mountains of northern Miyazaki, in country so folded and remote that it has long been counted among the most inaccessible corners of Japan. The residence here is documented as a work of the late Edo period, built in Bunsei 6 (1823), and it has belonged to the Nasu family for generations. Most visitors know it by another name. Locally it is called Tsurutomi Yashiki, the Tsurutomi Residence, after a story of war and parting that the village has kept alive for centuries.

The Shiiba Type: Building Sideways on a Mountain

Architectural historians classify the house as a parallel-row dwelling, a form so characteristic of this district that it is simply called the Shiiba type. Rooms are laid out in a horizontal line, each opening onto the same front veranda, so that the entire household unfolds along a single axis. On a hillside where carving out a deep, square plot would have meant enormous earthwork, a building one room deep made practical sense. It could perch on a thin terrace and still hold a full set of living spaces.

What earned the residence its 1956 designation as a national Important Cultural Property is not only this clever adaptation but the way it preserves older spatial ideas. The arrangement of rooms behind a continuous veranda echoes the shinden style of the Heian aristocracy, a courtly form here translated into the timber and thatch of a remote farming village. The builders worked with unusually large, thick members, giving the interior a weight and solidity rare in rural houses of its size.

The roof rewards a careful look. It is a hipped form built over a sasu frame, in which paired principal rafters lean against each other at the ridge. Along that ridge stand nine chigi, the forked finials more often seen crowning Shinto shrines than ordinary homes. The covering was once thatch, as the original designation recorded. In 1963 the surface was sheathed in copper plate to guard against fire, so the silhouette today keeps the steep thatched profile while shedding sparks rather than catching them.

Walking the Veranda, Room by Room

Step up onto the veranda and the plan reads itself from left to right. First comes the koza, a room set aside for the household's Buddhist altar, which by old custom women did not enter. Next is the dei, the formal room for receiving guests. Then the tsubone, used for sleeping, and finally the uchine, the everyday room where the family gathered around the hearth. Beyond them lies the doma, the earthen-floored space for work and storage. Standing at one end and looking down the row, you can take in the whole life of the house in a single sweep.

The story attached to the building belongs to the closing years of the twelfth century, after the Taira clan's defeat in the Genpei War. Survivors of the Taira are said to have fled into these mountains and settled quietly as farmers. The Minamoto court at Kamakura ordered the archer Nasu no Yoichi to hunt them down, but he was ill, so his younger brother Nasu no Daihachiro Munehisa came in his place. Finding the refugees living in poverty with no thought of rebellion, Daihachiro reported to Kamakura that the task was done and stayed on in the village, teaching farming and founding a shrine to the Taira's guardian deity.

He fell in love with Tsurutomi-hime, said to be a descendant of the Taira leader Kiyomori. When Kamakura recalled him, she was carrying his child. He left her a sword and the family genealogy, with word that if the child were a boy he should be sent north to the Nasu homeland. The child was a girl, and so Tsurutomi-hime remained in Shiiba. Her descendants took the Nasu name, and to this day roughly one in five villagers carries it. A grave traditionally said to be hers stands on the grounds of the residence. It is worth keeping in mind that the present house was built in the Edo period, long after the events of the legend. It is the home of the family the story made famous, rather than the house the legendary couple themselves shared.

Around the Residence

Next door stands the Shiiba Folk Performing Arts Museum, which gives the legend and the village's living traditions their fuller context. Its displays and films cover Shiiba kagura, the all-night sacred dance handed down through the area's hamlets, and the mournful folk song Hietsuki-bushi, which villagers sing of Daihachiro and Tsurutomi-hime's parting. A combined ticket covers both the residence and the museum.

The shrine Daihachiro is said to have founded, dedicated to the deity of Itsukushima on the Inland Sea, also survives in the village and hosts kagura performances in December. Each November the Shiiba Heike Festival fills the streets with a procession and pageantry built around the same tale of the Taira refugees and the Minamoto envoy who chose to spare them.

Reaching Shiiba takes commitment. The most common route is a long bus ride of more than two hours from Hyuga-shi Station on the coast, climbing through deep valleys to the village center. A ryokan run by Nasu descendants stands beside the residence, where travelers can stay overnight and, with advance arrangement, take a meal within the historic building itself.