Former Ozawa Family Residence, Main Building

The Former Ozawa Family Residence, Main Building: a post-town honjin rebuilt for a new century

For more than 250 years the Ozawa family ran the affairs of Hofukuji-juku, a small post town tucked into the hills northwest of Matsumoto. They held two jobs that mattered on any Edo-period highway: toiya, the official who organized porters, horses and freight for the station, and keeper of the honjin, the licensed inn where a travelling daimyo and his retinue could stop. When the lord of Matsumoto set out on his alternate-attendance journey to Edo, the usual routine was to leave the castle in the morning, break the trip at the Ozawa honjin, then climb over Hofukuji Pass toward Ueda. The house you see today is not that Edo inn. It went up in 1913 (Taisho 2), replacing a main house lost to fire five years earlier, and it was built to carry the old honjin dignity into the age of the railway.

The rebuilding is said to have followed the plan of the earlier main house. What survives is a tall, gable-fronted building of two storeys with a partial third, roughly 16.5 metres deep and 16.4 metres wide, its total floor area about 340 square metres. The front faces north toward the road. A steep tiled gable rises over an entrance placed on the gable end, a layout local builders call tsumairi. Across the Matsumoto basin this frontal, gable-first look belongs to a regional house type known as honmune-zukuri, and the Ozawa house borrows its grammar while pushing well past it: the walls stand higher, the pantile roof pitches more sharply, and layers of nuki (horizontal tie-beams that pass through the posts) are stacked across the gable face like a piece of exposed structural drawing.

Why it carries a national listing

In October 2021 the residence and its outbuildings were entered on the national register of tangible cultural properties. The distinction matters. Japan runs two parallel systems: shitei, active designation reserved for the most exceptional works, and toroku, a lighter-touch register created in 1996 to protect the enormous stock of everyday historic buildings, especially those from the Meiji period onward. The main house was listed under the criterion that it contributes to the historic character of the national landscape. In plain terms, the assessors valued it less as a rare masterpiece than as the anchor of a townscape that still reads as a post station.

Read the front elevation and you get a lesson in how status was expressed in wood. There are two shikidai, the raised board platform at a formal entrance; the southern one is dressed up with an irimoya hipped-and-gabled porch. Inside, the west end is a working earthen-floored doma, while the raised living quarters run in two rows of six rooms. The best of them, in the southeast corner, is a fifteen-mat reception room with a tokonoma display alcove. Historians who have studied the region read the whole facade as the most developed version of a formal, front-facing manner passed down among the area's official-class households. The feudal grammar is unmistakable even though the scale and materials are already modern.

What to look for on a visit

The room most people remember is the chanoma, the everyday sitting room at the core of the plan. Here it opens straight up through three storeys as a single shaft of space, capped by a skylight. On a clear morning the light falls the full height of the room, and the framing of beams and posts reads almost like scaffolding held up to the sun. It is a domestic space built with the confidence of a public one.

Step back onto the road and the point of the listing becomes obvious. The main house does not stand alone. It sits at the centre of a walled compound with storehouses to the north and south and a refined annex to the east, and the group together holds the line of the old highway. The family crest, incidentally, is the three-tiered diamond of the Ogasawara, the warrior house that first placed the Ozawa in charge here in the early 1600s.

A practical note. After a renovation begun in 2019, the main house and the annex have been put to use as a café and lodging, so parts of the interior can now be experienced rather than only glimpsed from the street. This remains a privately owned property, and access is not the same as at a public museum, so it is worth checking current opening arrangements before making the trip out to Shiga. Even from the road, the gable front and the run of white-walled storehouses reward an unhurried look.