Ninomiya Family Residence Main House

A Landowner's House on the Bentengata Lagoon

The Ninomiya Family Residence Main House (二宮家住宅主屋, Ninomiya-ke Jūtaku Shuoku) is an 1884 farmhouse built for a family of great landowners in Hasuno, Seirō Town, Niigata Prefecture, and was registered as a Registered Tangible Cultural Property in 2006. It is a timber building, mostly single-storey with a partial upper floor under a tiled roof, and it covers 756 square metres. Its present form dates from alterations made in 1951.

The Ninomiyas were village headmen under the Shibata domain who became one of Niigata's great landowning families, and the Main House is the centre of their estate.

What stands today is a rebuilding. Lightning set the old house on fire in 1875, and reconstruction took about nine years; 1884 is the year it was finished. The family says the new house repeated the lost one.

Why It Was Registered

Fifteen structures on the estate were registered together on 29 November 2006, each under its own number: gates, storehouses, a reception wing, a lakeside pavilion and this Main House at the centre. The Ninomiya Family Residence Main House was listed for its contribution to the historic landscape of the country.

Scale is the point. At 756 square metres it dwarfs the rice stores and storehouses around it, and it gathers reception rooms and family quarters under one long, low roof, lifting to a second floor only in part. Few buildings show so plainly how a headman's family of the domain era carried its standing into the Meiji period.

The 1951 alterations belong to the story too. According to the family, a fully two-storey hall used for weddings and banquets once stood where the garden is now, and it was removed in the years after the war. Details of the work on the Main House itself have not been published.

What to Look For

The principal reception room faces the Seishō-en garden and, beyond it, the open water of the Bentengata lagoon. The family describes a private house that commands both garden and lagoon from its zashiki as without parallel in Japan today. The garden was laid out with the rebuilding and is attributed to a gardener in the service of the Shibata domain.

At the edge of the veranda sits a stepping stone of Kamo River stone that came from the Shirase family of Shibata. Tradition holds that Emperor Meiji took off his shoes on it during his 1878 tour of the Hokuriku region. From the garden, the Main House reads as a long horizontal line of tile above the pines and camphor trees, which is the best way to grasp its size.

Visiting

The interior of the Ninomiya Family Residence Main House is not open. During the garden opening you see it from the Japanese garden, looking at the reception rooms along the garden side.

To take in the full length of the roof, walk to the far side of the garden near the lagoon and look back at the house. Follow the on-site guidance on photography.