Former Site of Siebold's House

Former Siebold Residence: A National Historic Site in Narutaki, Nagasaki

On a quiet hillside in the Narutaki district, about twenty minutes by tram from JR Nagasaki Station, a stone monument inscribed "Dr. von Siebold's Residence" marks the ground where a single Bavarian physician reshaped the course of medicine in Japan. The site, designated as a National Historic Site on October 12, 1922, is the place where Philipp Franz von Siebold (1796–1866) opened Narutaki-juku in 1824, the first private academy that an outsider was ever permitted to run inside the country during the closed-country era.

Officially registered under designation criterion No. 9, "sites relating to foreign countries and foreigners," it remains one of the comparatively rare historic sites in Japan whose value rests on cross-cultural exchange rather than domestic political or military history.

A Doctor, an Interpreter's Villa, and a Special Permit

Siebold arrived at Dejima, the artificial trading island in Nagasaki Bay, on August 11, 1823 at the age of twenty-seven. He had been hired by the Dutch government as resident physician and scientist for the trading post, which was at the time the only window through which European goods and ideas reached Japan. Foreigners on Dejima were normally forbidden to set foot on the mainland, but after Siebold successfully treated several Japanese patients of standing, the Nagasaki magistrate granted him an exception: he could travel into the city to see the sick, and eventually he could keep a house outside the trading island.

In 1824 he purchased a wooden two-story villa in Narutaki from the Dutch-language interpreter Yamasaki Saburō, on the wooded slope below Mt. Hoka. He turned its rooms into a library, study, and consulting clinic, and planted the garden with medicinal herbs and other species collected by his students from across the archipelago. He called the place Narutaki-juku and travelled there from Dejima several times a month to teach.

The place name itself has a small history of its own. The 24th Nagasaki magistrate, Ushigome Tadazaemon Katsutoshi, is said to have borrowed the name "Narutaki" from a famous valley of the same name in Kyoto, charmed by the sound of the stream coming down from the volcano behind.

Why the Site Was Designated

By the time the Imperial Diet enacted Japan's first comprehensive heritage-protection legislation in the 1910s, Narutaki-juku had become something of a sacred ground for the country's medical establishment. Of the roughly fifty disciples who studied here between 1824 and 1828, several went on to shape the modern Japanese state: Takano Chōei, the Rangaku scholar; Itō Genboku, who became the first Shogunate-appointed physician of Dutch medicine; Itō Keisuke, later Japan's first Doctor of Science; Kō Ryōsai, often called the father of Japanese ophthalmology; and Ninomiya Keisaku, who would later teach Siebold's own daughter Ine.

The 1922 designation cited the academy's role as the first foreign-led school of Western medicine in Japan, and as the principal channel through which European medical knowledge, botany, anatomy, and pharmacology entered the country. Designation criterion No. 9 was specifically created to recognize places of significance to Japan's relations with the outside world; Narutaki was among its earliest entries.

A small adjustment was made in March 1970, when a strip along the northern edge of the precinct was released from designation to permit the widening of a municipal road. The core of the site, including the surviving stone features and the cluster of trees Siebold himself planted, was untouched.

What You Actually See on the Ground

None of the wooden buildings remain. The main residence was severely damaged by the great typhoon of 1874, and the surviving structures were dismantled in 1894. Today the precinct reads more like an open garden than a building site, and that quietness is part of its character.

Two stone-lined wells from the original compound are still in place: one near the entrance and one set deeper inside the grounds. They are unassuming to look at, but they are the closest material link to the daily life of the school. The foundation stones (soseki) of the demolished buildings, sections of the original stone walls, and a flight of stone steps cut into the slope all survive as documented in the 1922 designation record.

Several trees said to have been planted by Siebold himself are still growing on the property and are protected under the name "Siebold's Trees" (Siebold no Ki). In the central clearing stands a bronze bust of Siebold in his later years, looking down toward the entrance, with the inscription "DR VON SIEBOLD" beneath. In June, hydrangeas bloom around the bust. Siebold had named one Japanese variety Hydrangea otaksa in honor of his Japanese partner, Kusumoto Taki, whom he affectionately called O-takusa.

The Adjacent Siebold Memorial Museum

Steps from the historic site itself, up a short flight of stone stairs, stands a red-brick building that catches everyone by surprise on a residential street in Nagasaki. This is the Siebold Memorial Museum, opened by the city in October 1989 as the first museum in Japan dedicated to a non-Japanese individual. Its facade is modelled on the house Siebold occupied in Leiden after his return to the Netherlands, and the entrance porch reproduces the home of his grandfather, the surgeon Karl Caspar von Siebold, in Würzburg.

Inside, around 1,500 items of Siebold-related material are on display, including 31 pieces designated as Important Cultural Properties: among them a lacquer toiletry box decorated with raden inlay portraying Siebold's Japanese wife and child, a wooden anatomical eye model used in teaching, and letters in Siebold's own hand. The museum charges 100 yen for adults, 50 yen for elementary and junior-high students, and opens 9:00 to 17:00 (last entry 16:30), closed Mondays and from December 29 to January 3.

The Wider Narutaki District

The lane leading up from Shin-Nakagawamachi tram stop to the residence site is officially named Siebold-dōri, "Siebold Street." It passes a series of small shrines, a stone-banked stream, and several family-run shops that have been in business for decades. The walk takes about seven minutes from the tram and rises gently uphill the whole way.

For visitors interested in the wider story, Dejima itself is a thirty-minute tram ride toward the harbor, where the reconstructed Dutch trading post can be toured. The Suwa Shrine, the Kōfuku-ji temple on the Teramachi temple row, and the Nagasaki Museum of History and Culture all lie within a manageable distance and round out a day focused on early-modern foreign exchange in the city.

If you can time a visit for early to mid-June, the hydrangeas around the bust and along the stone steps of the museum come into bloom. The grounds are at their best then, and the connection between Siebold and his Otakusa flower becomes more than an abstract anecdote.