Nonaka Family Garden

Nonaka-shi Garden: A Living Edo-Era Waterscape in Matsushiro

On the flat ground at the northeastern foot of Mount Zozan, tucked just behind a Shinto shrine, stands a samurai family home whose garden has kept doing its job for some three centuries. The Nonaka residence is a private house in the Matsushiro district of Nagano City, and the water that arrives in its crescent-shaped pond first passes through the grounds of Zozan Shrine next door, then runs along the shrine's western edge as a narrow stone-lined channel — a segi — before slipping under the boundary and entering the garden. That single, deliberate flow line carries with it the logic of an entire historic town.

Designated a National Registered Monument (登録記念物・名勝地, tōroku kinenbutsu) by the Agency for Cultural Affairs on July 28, 2008, the garden is one of a cluster of Matsushiro samurai-residence gardens entered on the registry that day. The four originally listed together — the former Yamadera Jozan residence garden, the Oki-shi garden, the Zozan Shrine pond, and the Nonaka-shi garden — share a feature found almost nowhere else in Japan at this scale: their ponds are physically linked, garden to garden, by hand-cut watercourses that have been flowing since the seventeenth century.

The Domain, the Family, and a City Designed Around Water

When Sanada Nobuyuki was transferred from Ueda to Matsushiro in 1622, the new lord laid out a castle town below the Sanada stronghold and parcelled the land into wards for retainers ranked by stipend. Higher-ranking samurai occupied plots near the castle; mid- and lower-ranking households filled the surrounding blocks. To bring drinking and irrigation water through this grid the engineers tapped the rivers descending from the Zozan and Kanda watersheds and laid an interlocking system of three channel types: kawa running beside the roads, segi threading between fields and houses, and — most distinctively — sensui-ro, slim ducts roughly 30 to 40 centimetres wide that pass through one garden's pond and out the next.

The Nonaka family was a samurai household of the Matsushiro domain whose name appears in the old castle-town maps. Their main house dates to the Edo period, with later interior renovations that left the original form intact. The north-facing udemikomon gate — a simple bracket-and-beam structure typical of mid-rank samurai entrances — is itself an Edo-period survivor.

In 1982 a team led by Otani Sachio of the University of Tokyo Faculty of Engineering surveyed the town and published a report titled Garden City Matsushiro. The phrase stuck. It captured what had previously gone unremarked: that across an entire former castle district, the private gardens functioned as nodes in a single, continuously running hydraulic landscape. The Nonaka garden is one of the clearest surviving examples.

Why It Was Registered

The registry citation singles out the unbroken connection between the ornamental pond and the household washing pond as the garden's particular value. In most surviving historic gardens in Japan the everyday utility has been engineered out — the ponds drained, the water lines re-routed underground, the laundry stones lifted. Here the original choreography is intact. Water entering from Zozan Shrine fills the crescent-shaped main pond, flows on to a smaller basin where pots and kettles were once washed, leaves the property through a segi, then re-enters at the northwest corner to fill a rectangular pond that served the laundry needs of tenants who once lived in a two-storey building near the gate.

This is, in other words, an Edo-period domestic landscape that never became a museum piece. The Agency for Cultural Affairs's registered-monument framework, introduced in 2004, was created precisely for cases like this — heritage of recognised but not yet "exceptional" value, worth protecting before time and remodelling erase it.

What to Look For

The south garden is the centrepiece. The pond, cut into a thin crescent, holds a single rock island. Pines on the far bank screen the view low to the ground, then release it upward toward the southern hills, which become the garden's shakkei — borrowed scenery. The composition is small but the depth is unexpected, and the trick is that the source of the water (the shrine pond on the other side of the fence) is invisible from the viewing position; the pond appears self-contained even as it is being continuously fed.

Follow the flow west and the secondary pond comes into view: smaller, plainer, with the flat stones beside it still arranged for the work they were made for. The water leaves here through a segi running along the property edge, slips around the building, and re-enters at the northwest, where the rectangular tenants' pond sits in front of two small household shrines — one to a tutelary deity, one to Tenjin, the patron of scholarship.

The north garden is a contrast. There is no water. The ground is given over to lawn, and stepping stones lead toward a sanson-seki-gumi, a triad rock composition of Buddhist origin in which a tall central stone is flanked by two smaller ones. After the activity of the south garden, this is the meditative half of the property.

Visiting the Garden

The Nonaka residence remains a private home, and the garden is not regularly open to the public. The exterior — the udemikomon gate, the boundary fences, the position relative to Zozan Shrine — can be observed from the surrounding lanes. Occasional autumn open-garden tours organised by Matsushiro heritage NPOs and the Shinshū Matsushiro Tourism Association include several of the registered samurai gardens by appointment; check current listings before travelling. The neighbouring properties at Zozan Shrine, the former Yamadera Jozan residence, and the former Higuchi residence are freely accessible and demonstrate the same water-channel principles at work.

Around the Garden

Matsushiro rewards slow exploration. Within a fifteen-minute walk are Zozan Shrine, dedicated to the late-Edo polymath Sakuma Shozan (1811–1864), whose intellectual circle included Katsu Kaishu, Sakamoto Ryoma and Yoshida Shoin; the Sanada Residence (Shin-Goten), an 1864 daimyo retirement villa designated a National Historic Site; Matsushiro Castle Ruins, restored in 2004; and the Bunbu Gakko, the Sanada domain's official school of letters and martial arts. The former Yokota residence, an Important Cultural Property and one of the most complete mid-rank samurai house compounds in Japan, sits a short walk south.

Matsushiro can be reached by route bus from JR Nagano Station (around 30–40 minutes) on the Shinetsu line. The Matsushiro Sanso onsen, with its distinctive iron-rich golden waters, is a popular overnight option for visitors who want time to walk the town at dawn and dusk, when the channel water carries the clearest reflections.