Kikuya Family Residence (Tsukigase Village, Soegami

A Farmhouse on the Old Iga Road

The Kikuya Family Residence stands beside a lane that branches off the old highway running from Nara toward Iga-Ueno, in the hillside hamlet of Momogano in Tsukigase. It is a single thatched building, the main house (omoya) of a farming family, and it has stood here since roughly the end of the 17th century. The frontage measures about 10.5 metres and the depth about 8.3 metres, modest by the standards of surviving Edo-period houses, which is part of why it matters.

The family name carries a small clue to its past. Kikuya is said to come from the trade name of an inn (hatago) the household once ran alongside farming, a reminder that a house on a through-road often did more than work the fields around it.

The roof is built in the irimoya style, a hipped-and-gabled form, and covered in thatch that hangs low over the walls. The Agency for Cultural Affairs dates the building to between the late 1600s and the early 1700s, the middle of the Edo period.

Why a Small House Was Designated

The residence became an Important Cultural Property on 25 April 1968. The reason given was not grandeur but the opposite: the official assessment describes a small dwelling with distinctive features in its form, method, and structure, valuable precisely because so few houses of its kind survive.

Inside, the plan follows what specialists call the "front-zashiki three-room" arrangement (mae-zashiki san-madori). The earthen-floored work area, the doma, occupies the east side and is generously sized; its posts were dressed with an adze, leaving the faceted marks of the chona rather than the smooth surface of a plane. West of the doma the floor is raised, with posts set at one-ken intervals along the boundary. A zashiki, the formal room, lies to the south; a shimo-no-ma to the north, with a nando, a storeroom-cum-sleeping chamber, above it.

This layout was already old-fashioned when the house was built. Across the Kinai region around Nara and Kyoto, farmhouses were shifting toward a four-room plan by the end of the 18th century, but Tsukigase held on to the earlier form. The Kikuya house keeps that conservatism in wood.

The roof structure tells a parallel story. Its framing sits between two techniques, the older rafter-based (taruki) construction giving way to the sasu, a system of paired inclined struts that carry the ridge. Builders rarely left so clear a snapshot of a method caught in mid-change.

What to Notice from the Road

Because the Kikuya house is a private home, there is no ticket desk and no set opening hours. Visitors see it from the lane, and even from there several things reward a slow look.

Start with the silhouette. The low eaves and the heavy sweep of thatch give the building a grounded, almost crouching profile that suits the steep ground of Momogano, where houses cling to the slope above the river.

The contrast between the two halves of the house reads even from outside: the broad, dark mouth of the doma on one side, the raised living rooms on the other. If you can glimpse the doma posts, look for the shallow ridges left by the adze, a texture that machine-cut timber never has.

Spring is the season most people come. The hillsides around fill with plum blossom, and the old farmhouse set against bare branches and early flowers makes a quieter counterpart to the crowds down by the water.

Around Tsukigase

Momogano sits on the left bank of Tsukigase Lake, the reservoir formed by the Takayama Dam on the Nabari River. The area's best-known sight is the Tsukigase Plum Grove, designated a national Place of Scenic Beauty in 1922, where around ten thousand plum trees line the gorge. In late winter and early spring the Plum Festival brings walkers along the riverside paths, with tea and local sweets sold at small stands.

The grove proper lies across the water around Oyama, while Momogano itself offers quieter lanes, lake views, and rock-carved Buddhist images scattered through the hills.

Reaching Tsukigase takes some planning. From JR or Kintetsu Nara Station, a bus toward Ishiuchi (Tsukigase) reaches the Momoganoguchi stop in about 70 minutes, leaving a walk of roughly 10 minutes to the hamlet. From the Iga side, buses run from near Ueno-shi Station toward Momogano in about 30 minutes. By car it is about an hour from central Nara.