Takizawa Family Residence Main Building

A Mid-Edo Farmhouse on the Terraces of Isobe

Takizawa-ke Jūtaku Shuoku (瀧澤家住宅主屋, also written 滝澤家住宅主屋), the main house of the Takizawa family residence in the Isobe district of Chikuma City, Nagano Prefecture, is a mid-Edo-period thatched farmhouse that was entered on Japan's register of Tangible Cultural Properties on June 28, 2017.

The house stands at the center of a walled compound and faces west. Its frame runs twelve ken along the length and six and a half across, roughly 22 by 12 meters in modern units, with a registered floor area of 333 square meters. Over that footprint rises a hipped thatched roof, yosemune-zukuri, whose ridge reaches about seven meters. Wooden construction, single story with a partial second floor: the official wording is spare, and the numbers only take on weight when the whole mass of thatch is standing in front of you at the roadside.

The Agency for Cultural Affairs places the core of the building somewhere between 1661 and 1751, with alterations carried out in the decades that followed, approximately 1751 to 1830. Two campaigns of work, then, separated by the better part of a century, which is an ordinary enough history for a house that has been lived in continuously for three hundred years.

The Takizawa are said to have been a warrior family who took the Takeda side during the Warring States period and fought the Murakami clan, whose fortified sites are scattered across the hills of this same district. After the fighting ended the family turned to the land, settled here, and served the village as kumigashira, a deputy to the headman. Households of that rank built large, and this one did.

Registered as a Model of Form

Japan's registration system for tangible cultural properties, created in 1996, is deliberately lighter than designation as an Important Cultural Property. Owners keep a free hand over daily use and ordinary repair; in return the state records the building, offers technical guidance, and provides limited tax relief. Three criteria admit a structure to the register: contribution to the historic character of the landscape, value as a model of form, and difficulty of reproduction.

The main house was registered under the second criterion, as a model of form. Its two companions on the same property, the storehouse and the nagayamon gate, came in under the first. The split repays attention, because it means the house was judged on what it is structurally rather than on the picture it makes from the road.

What earned that judgment sits along the line where the earthen floor meets the raised floor. In most farmhouses of this scale a daikokubashira, one oversized pillar, anchors that boundary and gathers the load of the roof frame above it. Here there is no such pillar. Posts stand instead at every ken, a little under two meters apart, in an even row. The arrangement belongs to an older way of building, from before carpenters in this region learned to concentrate structure into a few heavy members, and its survival at this size is uncommon.

A second point cited in the registration file is smaller and easy to walk past. The frontage of the ima, the main living room, is extended by one shaku, about 30 centimeters, beyond the module the rest of the plan obeys. The Agency treats this as one of the features by which the house preserves the building habits of this particular district during the early modern centuries, rather than as a quirk of one carpenter.

The southern half of the interior is given over to the doma, the earth-floored work space, together with what was once the stable. Horses were housed under the same roof as the family, divided from them by a threshold and not much else. Work half and living half side by side beneath a single span of thatch: that plan was standard through the farming villages of the Chikuma River valley, and few examples of this size are left standing.

Seeing the House

One thing has to be said plainly before anything else. The Takizawa house is a private home, the family lives in it, and the interior is not open to visitors. Everything described above is visible from the public road that runs along the western side of the compound, and a visit should stay there. Do not step onto the grounds and do not shoot through gaps in the gate or the hedge. Photography from the road is unobjectionable; photographing the household is not.

From that road the composition reads at a glance. The long thatched gate closes the western boundary, and behind and above it the main roof rises, broader and steeper, with the two thatched masses overlapping in a way that photographs badly and rewards standing still. Roofs like these were once ordinary across northern Shinano. Almost all of them have gone to sheet metal or tile.

Look at the eaves line. Thatch is cut and combed at the edge, and the thickness of that cut, usually somewhere between 30 and 50 centimeters, tells you how recently the roof has been worked on. Look also at where the roof planes meet: the hipped form has no gable, so all four slopes run down from a short ridge, and the geometry of the corners is where a thatcher's skill shows.

Access is straightforward. Togura Station on the Shinano Railway is the nearest stop, a little over a kilometer away, fifteen to twenty minutes on foot through the flat district north of the station. Drivers will find the Sarashina Interchange on the Nagano Expressway within about fifteen minutes. There is no visitor parking at the house itself, which matters: the lane is narrow and residents use it.

Winter suits the building. Snow settles unevenly on thatch and picks out the roof planes, and the trees around the compound are bare enough to let the whole outline show. In late March and early April the apricot orchards for which Chikuma is known come into bloom a few kilometers north, and the Togura-Kamiyamada hot spring district lies a short distance southwest. The Murakami clan fortification sites, a Nagano prefectural historic site, occupy the slopes of Isobe itself, which makes for a coherent half-day if you are interested in why a warrior family ended up farming here.