Miyazawa Family Residence

About the Miyazawa Family Residence

The Miyazawa Family Residence (宮澤家住宅, Miyazawa-ke Jūtaku) is the estate of an old local family at 3042 Misato Akemori, Azumino City, Nagano Prefecture, where seven buildings, gates and walls dating from an 1885 storehouse to a 1936 main house were entered on Japan's register of Registered Tangible Cultural Properties in 1998.

According to the Agency for Cultural Affairs, the Miyazawa were a long-established family of the district. The head of the family two generations back served as village mayor, and the following head ran a silk-reeling business. The estate is owned today by Miyazawa Hozen, a private company.

At the center stands a two-story main house under a deep-eaved Irimoya-zukuri hip-and-gable roof. Around it are a storehouse, a detached wing and a barn, with stone gateposts and walls on the east and south and a kabukimon back gate on the north. Azumino City lists the group in its cultural property register as "Miyazawa Family Residence Main House and others (seven structures)".

Seven Structures in Three Phases

All seven parts of the Miyazawa Family Residence were registered together on September 2, 1998, in the thirteenth round of registrations, under numbers 20-0006 to 20-0008 and 20-0010 to 20-0013. Ordered by the dates in the national database, they run as follows.

• Storehouse: 1885
• Kabukimon gate; barn and former chicken coop: around 1920
• Gateposts, stone wall and roofed wall: around 1920 and around 1936
• Detached wing: around 1935
• Main house and udegimon gate: 1936 and around 1936

The dates fall into three phases. The Meiji storehouse stands alone; the back gate and service buildings were added around 1920; and in 1935 and 1936 the main house and everything around its front went up in a single campaign. The Agency describes the stone gate and wall as rebuilt when the main house was reconstructed, which suggests the 1936 house replaced an earlier one. The detached wing was finished before it.

Every one of the seven was registered for its contribution to the historic landscape. What the register recognizes is the arrangement as a whole: storehouse, gates and walls closing around the main house.

How the Miyazawa Estate Is Laid Out

Stone and roofed walls enclose the Miyazawa Family Residence from east to south, about 90 meters in all. The front gate has no doors: it is a pair of granite posts, each built of three large cut blocks and capped with a stone ball.

Beside the entrance of the main house, to its right, a smaller udegimon gate screens the garden in front of the formal rooms. The detached wing sits on the west of the lot with the storehouse just north of it, and both share the same black-and-white Namako-kabe tile facing on their lower walls.

On the north side is the kabukimon back gate, flanked by the former chicken coop, with the barn running south from there along a boundary water channel. From outside, the barn reads as another stretch of roofed wall. The front is closed by stone and tiled walls; the back is closed by working buildings standing in for a wall. The pages for each structure go into their construction and details.

Visiting the Miyazawa Family Residence

The Miyazawa Family Residence is privately owned, and no official information about public opening or interior tours could be found as of September 2026. A visit means looking at the walls and gates from outside. Please stay off the property and avoid peering into the living quarters. No guidance on photography was found either.

The Miyazawa estate lies about 400 meters west of Nakagaya Station on the JR Ōito Line (straight-line distance on the map), a walk of a few minutes. No information on visitor parking could be found.