Grave of the Suwa Family, Lords of Takashima Domain

Seven Lords, One Hillside: The Takashima Domain Cemetery Above Lake Suwa

Climb the path behind Onsenji temple in Suwa City, and seven stone tombs come into view, each rising about three meters from a square three-tiered plinth, each capped with the same rounded boat-shaped marker. They mark the resting places of the second through eighth lords of Takashima Domain, who governed this lakeside basin in central Nagano from 1601 until the Meiji Restoration of 1868. Together with a smaller burial ground in neighboring Chino City, where the founding lord lies with his parents in a vermilion-painted mausoleum, this is the Takashima Lords' Suwa Family Cemetery (Takashima-hanshu Suwa-ke Bosho), designated a National Historic Site on 9 February 2017.

What makes the site exceptional is consistency. The Suwa family ruled the same 27,000-koku territory for nearly 270 years without a single transfer to another province, a rarity among Edo-period domains, and every lord from the second onward was buried here, even those who died at the family's Edo residence. Standing among the tombs today, a visitor reads a continuous family line preserved in stone.

The Suwa Family: From Shrine Priests to Daimyo

The Suwa traced their origins to the chief priesthood (ōhōri) of Suwa Taisha, the great shrine complex that gives the lake its name. For centuries they were not warriors but officiants of one of the oldest cults in Japan, served Hōjō overlords in the Kamakura period, and held appointments under the Muromachi shogunate. The transition to warlord status proved costly. In 1542, Takeda Shingen invaded the Suwa basin and forced the head of the family, Suwa Yorishige, to take his own life.

The line survived through a cousin. Suwa Yoritada, who had been appointed ōhōri of the upper shrine in 1547, gradually rebuilt the family's standing, and in 1583 Tokugawa Ieyasu confirmed him in his ancestral lands. When Ieyasu was transferred east to the Kantō plain in 1590, the Suwa went with him, holding small fiefs first at Naranashi in Musashi and then at Sōja in Kōzuke.

Restoration came through Yoritada's son Yorimizu, who joined Tokugawa Hidetada's army at Sekigahara in 1600 and helped attack Ueda Castle. The reward, granted in October of the following year, was a return to Suwa with 27,000 koku and the title of first lord of Takashima. From that moment forward, the family's burial customs took shape, and the two sites that comprise this National Historic Site began their long history.

Why It Became a National Historic Site

The Agency for Cultural Affairs cited the cemetery under criterion seven (tombs and stelae), emphasizing how unusually well it documents the burial practices of an early modern daimyō house. Several features informed the decision.

The grave markers themselves are unlike anything in most Japanese cemeteries. Each one is a single block carved into a half-section of a muhōtō, the seamless egg-shaped stupa associated with Zen abbots, then mounted on its flat side atop a stepped andesite plinth. The form is sometimes described as boat-shaped (funagata). Including the base, each marker stands roughly three meters tall and over three meters wide. The seven Onsenji markers share this exact form, identifying the lords as members of a single line at a single glance.

The grave of the second lord, Tadatsune, carries an additional refinement: the carved characters of his posthumous Buddhist name are filled with gold leaf paste (kindei), and the joint where the marker's two stones meet is sealed with white lime plaster (shikkui). It is among the few markers nationwide where this finishing technique survives in such clear condition.

Equally important is what surrounds the tombs. More than a hundred stone lanterns flank the central avenue, each donated by a retainer family of the domain. The lanterns transform the burial ground into a kind of stone register of vassalage, a record in granite of who served whom.

Onsenji: Seven Lords on the Hillside

Onsenji sits on a slope northeast of the former Takashima Castle, about 1.3 kilometers as the crow flies, looking out over Lake Suwa toward the Kiso range. The temple belongs to the Rinzai school of Zen, Myōshinji branch, and was established in 1649 by the second lord, Suwa Tadatsune, to serve as the family's bodaiji, the temple where memorial rites would be performed for generations. The current main hall was relocated from the Takashima Castle in 1870 after a fire destroyed the original buildings; it had begun life as the castle's Noh stage, which explains its rounded roof line.

The cemetery itself lies further up, on three terraced platforms. The seven daimyō tombs occupy the uppermost level. Below them are the more irregularly placed graves of consorts and children, and below those a working cemetery still in use today. The route between the temple gate and the daimyō level is a stone-stepped climb of about 150 meters, shaded by tall trees.

Tadatsune's tomb originally had its own wooden mausoleum, built by the third lord, Tadaharu, in 1673. By the early 2000s the structure had become unstable, and in 2007 it was dismantled for conservation; the component parts are held in storage, and a temporary covering now protects the marker. Even without its hall, Tadatsune's tomb is marked out from the others: a reminder that within a line of seven, the founder of the burial ground still holds primacy.

A more recent excavation in front of the eighth lord Tadamichi's tomb uncovered a paved stone approach, suggesting that the path leading to each burial may once have been more elaborately constructed than the present site reveals.

Raigakuji: The Founder and His Parents

Some 15 kilometers southeast, in the Chino part of the Suwa basin, the founding lord Yorimizu rests in a different setting. Raigakuji was established in 1631, near the ruins of Uehara Castle, the mountainside stronghold from which the Suwa had ruled the basin in medieval times. The temple belongs to the Sōtō school of Zen rather than Rinzai. Yorimizu had originally intended to build a new memorial temple in the castle town, but he died in 1641 before completing the plan, and was buried beside his parents instead.

The burial chamber here is a building rather than a row of markers. Reached by stone steps to the left of the main hall, the mausoleum (otamaya) is a single-story wooden structure with an irimoya tiled roof, measuring roughly 8.2 meters by 3.6 meters, its frame and outer walls painted vermilion. The current building was reconstructed in 1859, after an earlier fire destroyed the temple.

The interior divides into three rooms. At center lies the father, Suwa Yoritada, accompanied by a paired stupa-form monument: a hōkyōin-tō and a gorintō together. To the right is the mother, Rishōin, with the same paired arrangement. To the left rests Yorimizu himself, his remains housed within a stone reliquary carved from andesite, a quieter, more enclosed form than the open markers at Onsenji.

The surrounding precinct holds a further point of interest. Members of the ōhōri family and senior domain officials are buried in the temple grounds nearby, making Raigakuji a kind of compressed map of who mattered in the Suwa hierarchy.

Visiting the Sites

Both burial grounds are open to the public free of charge and without reservation, though visitors are asked not to touch the stonework: the markers and lanterns are old and not all of them are securely fixed. Photography is permitted in both precincts.

Onsenji is reached from JR Kamisuwa Station by a walk of about 15 minutes through residential streets. The temple has its own parking, and a small public lot at Yunowaki Fureai Square nearby serves visitors heading specifically to the cemetery. From the main hall, signs point along the right-hand path past the multi-storied tahōtō pagoda up to the burial ground; allow about 30 minutes for a careful look.

Raigakuji is best reached from JR Chino Station, either by Suwa Bus on the Okaya line (about 10 minutes to the Raigakuji-shita stop, then a 5-minute walk) or by car from the Suwa Interchange of the Chūō Expressway (about 7 minutes). The temple is an active Zen training monastery, so visitors should keep voices low, especially near the main hall.

Late October to early November sees a small autumn-foliage event called Tono-sama ga Aishita Suwa Sanzan Kōyō Meguri ("Three Mountain Temples Loved by the Lord"), which links Onsenji with two nearby temples (Chōenji and Buppō-Shōryūji) for special evening illuminations and limited goshuin stamps. Onsenji's weeping cherry, said to have been planted around the time of Tadatsune and now over 370 years old, is the spring counterpart.

Around the Burial Grounds

Suwa is best known to most travelers for its hot springs and its lake. Both are minutes from Onsenji. The Yunowaki neighborhood at the foot of the temple slope was once the bathing district preferred by the lords themselves, and several public baths still operate within a short walk. The reconstructed Takashima Castle, which the daimyō saw daily from their drawing-rooms, sits roughly 1.3 kilometers to the southwest and is a worthwhile companion visit; its compact donjon overlooks a moat of water drawn from the lake.

From Chino, the upper precinct of Suwa Taisha (Honmiya and Maemiya, two of the four shrine complexes) is a short drive. The connection is direct: the Suwa family served as the shrine's chief priests for centuries before becoming feudal lords. Visiting the shrine before or after the cemetery shows the institutional foundation on which the daimyō lineage stood.

For those interested in the medieval roots of the family, the ruins of Uehara Castle lie immediately behind Raigakuji on the slopes of Mount Konpira. A trail of about 40 minutes climbs to the main bailey at 976 meters elevation, where the view across the basin makes plain why the Suwa chose this site as their stronghold for more than a century.