Shiohara Family Residence (Matsumoto)

About the Shiohara Family Residence (Matsumoto)

The Shiohara Family Residence (塩原家住宅, Shiohara-ke Jūtaku) in Imai, Matsumoto City, Nagano Prefecture, is the homestead of an old farming family whose four buildings, put up between about 1907 and 1919, became Registered Tangible Cultural Properties on March 2, 2004. Matsumoto City describes the Shioharas as the family that served as Shōya, or village headman, for a settlement on newly cleared farmland, and as a name that comes up again and again in the history of the Imai district.

The four registered buildings are the main house, the front gate, a rice storehouse and a silkworm rearing house. A different property with the same Japanese characters stands in Taguchi-machi, Maebashi, Gunma Prefecture, but that family name is read Shiobara and the buildings belong to another household. This page covers the Shiohara Family Residence in Imai, Matsumoto.

A Farming District and a Silk-Raising Household

Imai lies in the southwest of Matsumoto City. According to the city, farmland still covers roughly 70 percent of the district, and Shinshu Matsumoto Airport and the Shinshu Skypark sit within its boundaries.

Matsumoto City dates the Shiohara buildings to the late Meiji and mid-Taisho periods. The rice storehouse is the earliest, from around 1907. The main house and the gate followed in the early Taisho years, and the silkworm rearing house was built in 1919. The upper floor of the main house was used mainly for raising silkworms, and behind it stands the silkworm house, a long building ten bays (about 18 meters) across. The Agency for Cultural Affairs singles out that building as one that preserves the look of a wealthy farmhouse that prospered on sericulture.

Raising silkworms upstairs in the family home and then adding a separate building for the work says a good deal about how closely this household's income was tied to silk. With a granary for rice on the same plot, the Shiohara Family Residence shows a farm that leaned on both crops at once.

How the Four Buildings Are Arranged

The Agency's descriptions make it possible to sketch the layout of the Shiohara Family Residence.

• The main house stands in the middle of the plot. It is a two-story timber building with an Irimoya-zukuri hip-and-gable roof of Sangawara-buki pantiles and a building area of 464 square meters, with a storehouse built into its northeast corner.
• The gate is the front entrance, set toward the east side of the plot, with a Sodobei wing wall on each side.
• The rice storehouse stands in front of the main house to the right as you face it, turned so that its own front looks toward the house. Its building area is 51 square meters.
• The silkworm rearing house stands behind the main house. It is a two-story timber building with a sheet-iron roof and a building area of 131 square meters.

All four were registered on March 2, 2004, and announced in the official gazette on March 29, under the consecutive numbers 20-0175 to 20-0178. The main house, gate and silkworm house were registered for contributing to the historic landscape of the country. The rice storehouse alone was registered as a model of architectural form.

Read from front to back, the plot moves from the gate where visitors were received, past the house where the family lived, to the building where the silkworms were kept. Seeing all of it on a single site is what gives the Shiohara Family Residence its value.

Visiting the Shiohara Family Residence

The Shiohara Family Residence is privately owned and is not open to the public. As of October 5, 2026, Matsumoto City's page on the property listed no visiting days or arrangements for viewing. If you go, stay off the property, keep your voice down and look only from outside, out of respect for the people who live there. There is no parking for visitors.

The address is 5990 Imai, Matsumoto City, Nagano Prefecture. The nearest railway station is Hirooka on the JR Shinonoi Line, about 5 kilometers to the east in a straight line, and Shinshu Matsumoto Airport is about 3 kilometers to the northeast. That is too far to walk comfortably, so a car or taxi is the practical choice.