Hoashi Family Branch Residence (Shoseki Furokan)

What the Hoashi Family Branch Residence Is

The Hoashi Family Branch Residence (Shoseki Furokan) (帆足家分家住宅（松石不老館）, Hoashi-ke Bunke Jutaku Shōseki Furōkan) is a Meiji-era merchant compound in Hetsugi Honmachi, Nakahetsugi, Oita City, Oita Prefecture, where eleven structures, including a grain storehouse and a miso storehouse built in 1889 and a main house built in 1906, were listed as Registered Tangible Cultural Property on 10 November 2005. The name Shoseki Furokan is read shōseki furōkan; the Japanese characters combine pine, stone and agelessness.

Eight of the eleven are buildings: the main house, a reception wing, a two-story rear wing, a bathhouse, and four storehouses for tools, pawned goods, grain and miso. The other three are what Japanese heritage law calls structures rather than buildings: a gate, a wall and a roofed well. The main house faces the street; everything else sits behind it.

Few provincial merchant houses keep every working part of the household. Here the rooms for trade, the rooms for guests, the washing and water supply and the storage all survive on one plot, and each was registered on its own. Walk the outside of the Hoashi Family Branch Residence and you can still see how a Meiji shopkeeping household arranged its life in wood, plaster and stone.

The Hoashi Family and Hetsugi Honmachi

Hetsugi Honmachi grew up near the Ono River in the south of what is now Oita City. In the Edo period it was a licensed market town on the Hyuga road, one of the few places outside a castle town where trade was allowed. According to Oita City, the Hoashi family served as the district's senior village headmen, shoya of the highest rank, and entertained literati such as the painter Tanomura Chikuden and the scholar Rai San'yo.

The main line of the family lived in the house known as Fushunkan, itself listed separately as the Hoashi Family Main Residence (Fushunkan). The Oita City Tourist Association describes that household as one that built its fortune on sake brewing. The Hoashi Family Branch Residence belonged to a cadet line of the same family and stands on the same street.

No public source consulted for this article states what trade the branch family followed. Two clues sit in the buildings. The main house is laid out as a shop house with a through-passage floor of beaten earth, and one storehouse is called the shichigura, the pawn storehouse, a name used for the store where pledged goods were kept.

The main house dates to 1906, the same year a great fire swept Hetsugi Honmachi. An Oita Prefecture newsletter notes that the town's clustered storehouses came through that fire. The grain and miso storehouses of the Hoashi Family Branch Residence were built in 1889, 17 years before the main house. Whether the main house replaced one lost in the fire is not recorded in the Agency for Cultural Affairs (ACA) entries, and this article does not assume it.

How the Grounds Are Laid Out

The plot fronts the street on its east side. The main house runs north to south along that frontage. At the southeast corner a gate stands a little back from the road, facing east. North of the main house a wall continues along the street and ends in a small garden gate set at a right angle. That eastern face is what a passer-by sees.

Behind the main house, toward the north, the reception wing runs east to west, its wide veranda looking south over an inner garden. West of the kitchen stand the bathhouse and its adjoining bath room, and west of those the well house. The two-story rear wing fills the southwest corner, with a back-gate block joined to its western end at a right angle.

The storehouses hug the north and west boundaries. The pawn storehouse sits in a corner of the garden north of the main house, with the tool storehouse at the northwest edge. On the far west the grain storehouse, the largest on the property, faces east, and the miso storehouse continues from its north end. Read from the street inward, the order runs from trade and hospitality through daily life to storage.

• Main House (1906, registration no. 44-0103)
• New Reception Wing (mid-Meiji period, 44-0104)
• Tool Storehouse (mid-Meiji period, 44-0105)
• Pawn Storehouse (mid-Meiji period, 44-0106)
• Bathhouse and Bath Room (mid-Meiji period, 44-0107)
• Well House (mid-Meiji period, 44-0108)
• Grain Storehouse (1889, 44-0109)
• Miso Storehouse (1889, 44-0110)
• Rear Two-Story Wing (mid-Meiji period, 44-0111)
• Gate (mid-Meiji period, 44-0112)
• Wall (mid-Meiji period, 44-0113)

The main house alone was registered under the criterion of being difficult to reproduce; the other ten were registered for their contribution to the historic landscape. The ACA commentary singles out the design of the main house's guest rooms, and calls the well house valuable for what it shows of daily life at the time.

Lot numbers differ from building to building. The ACA database places seven entries, including the main house, gate, wall and well house, at 4361 Nakahetsugi; the tool and pawn storehouses at 4363; the miso storehouse at 4362; and the reception wing across 4361 and 4363.

Visiting and Getting There

The Hoashi Family Branch Residence is not a public attraction. The ACA database lists no owner, and no public source announces viewing days or accepts visits (checked 25 September 2026). What you can see is the exterior from the street on the east side.

From the street, look for the east face of the main house, the gate at the southeast corner, and the wall with its garden gate running north. Most of the reception wing and storehouses stand deep in the plot, screened by the main house and wall. This is private property: stay outside the gate and keep your camera away from windows and doorways. The far side of the road gives the best single frame, from the main house to the end of the wall.

Local buses run from JR Oita Station to the Hetsugi stop in about 35 minutes. The Oita City Tourist Association puts the Hoashi main house about 5 minutes' walk from the stop, and the branch residence stands on the same street roughly 100 metres away. By car, allow about 30 minutes from central Oita.

The main family's Fushunkan compound is open as shops and a gallery. Seeing its late-Edo layout first and then walking down the street to the branch family's Meiji frontage is the clearest way to compare two households of one family.