Hoashi Family Main Residence (Fushunkan)

A Sake Brewer's Estate on the Old Hyuga Road

Hoashi Family Main Residence (Fushunkan) is the estate of the Hoashi head family in Nakahetsugi, Oita City, Oita Prefecture, where eight structures centred on a main house of 1865 were entered on the national register as Registered Tangible Cultural Properties in 2006.

Locally the compound goes by Hoashi Honke Fushunkan (帆足本家 富春館, also written 帆足家本家住宅（富春館）). The family's own account traces the line to the Kusu district of Bungo early in the twelfth century. The Hoashi served the Ōtomo lords and settled at Hetsugi in 1586. Under the Usuki domain of the Inaba lords they acted as village headmen, and Oita City's heritage plan calls them ōjōya, the senior headman family of the district. They farmed, but it was sake that built the fortune.

The street outside, Hetsugi Honmachi, sat on the Hyūga Kaidō highway and had a landing for boats on the Ōno River. In the Edo period it grew into a zaigōmachi, a trading town rooted in farm country rather than clustered beneath a castle, supplying the villages around it. Oita City now lists the townscape and the spring festival of its Hachiman shrine among the historic landscapes it is committed to maintaining.

A Name from Rai San'yō, a Salon for Painters

The name Fushunkan is said to have come from Rai San'yō, the Confucian historian and poet. The family says San'yō chose it and brushed it out for them. The Oita City Tourist Association adds that Fushun was the name of the sake the house brewed.

What spread the name, though, was company rather than sake. Tanomura Chikuden, the literati painter from Taketa, first visited in 1816 and came back again and again, sometimes painting for his hosts. By the family's account the ninth head of the house wrote haikai verse, and his fourth son, Hoashi Kyōu, became Chikuden's pupil. For a time Fushunkan served as a salon for the scholar-painters of Bungo.

Works by Chikuden and his circle that came down through the family are now shown at the Oita City Museum of Art as the Fushunkan Collection, according to the tourist association.

Reading the Layout

The eight registered parts of Hoashi Family Main Residence (Fushunkan) are stacked from the road northward. Along the southern edge, from west to east, stand the pawn storehouse, the front gate and the Western-style house. The gate is set back a little from the road line, with the earthen storehouse on one side and the Western-style house on the other, and those three between them give the estate its street face.

Through the gate, the main house stands near the centre of the plot, facing south. Beside the west end of its formal Shikidai entrance is the middle gate, and from it a roofed earthen wall runs south, cutting the entrance court off from the garden that lies south of the house. A longer wall wraps the south and west sides of that garden, running north from the corner of the pawn storehouse and then turning toward a small wooden shrine southwest of the treasure storehouse. The treasure storehouse itself sits in the southwest of the grounds on a raised stone base. North of the main house, joined to it by a corridor, is the annex.

The natural route is gate, then entrance court, where the middle gate and its wall make the most sense, then into the main house and on to the annex. Out in the garden, following the wall brings you round the back of both storehouses. The Western-style house, next door to the front gate, works as a first stop or a last one.

Eight Entries over Seventy Years

All eight were registered on 29 November 2006 and carry consecutive numbers, from 44-0117 for the main house to 44-0124 for the garden wall.

Their dates run from the last years of the shogunate into the early Shōwa era. The main house of 1865 is the oldest, with the front and middle gates assigned to the same late Edo years. The Taishō era added the Western-style house in 1916, the pawn storehouse at about the same time, and the treasure storehouse and garden wall. Last came the annex in 1937. The spread of some 70 years is a record of a brewing family adding to its house generation by generation.

Two registration criteria are in play. The main house and the annex were registered as difficult to reproduce, a judgement on their materials and craftsmanship. The other six were registered for contributing to the historic landscape, valued as the gates, walls and outbuildings that give the estate its shape.

The Hoashi brewery building next door is a separate property, designated by Oita City rather than registered nationally. Its ridge tablet dates it to 1909, and its two-storey fermenting hall uses Western-style roof trusses. Brewing stopped in 1972; the family later gave the building to the city, which designated it in 2003.

Visiting

Hoashi Family Main Residence (Fushunkan) is privately owned, but the family runs it as an open site. The main house and annex serve as a gallery and the Western-style house as a restaurant, and during opening hours you can walk the grounds and look at the buildings freely. The city tourist association gives gallery hours of 11 a.m. to 5 p.m., closed Mondays and Tuesdays (the following day when a public holiday falls on either) and over the New Year.

No charge is listed for walking the grounds, and the brewery building next door is free. The brewery is open 9 a.m. to 4:30 p.m. on the same days as the gallery. Staff will guide visitors round the house and explain its history on request; groups should ask ahead.

There is no published photography policy. Shooting the exteriors should raise no difficulty, but the rooms of the main house and annex are hung with artists' work for sale, so ask before photographing indoors.

By public transport, take a local bus from JR Oita Station for about 35 minutes to the Hetsugi stop, then walk about 5 minutes. From Nakahanda Station on the JR Hōhi Line the family gives the walk as about 20 minutes. Drivers can reach the site in about 10 minutes from the Ōita-Mera interchange on the Higashi-Kyūshū Expressway, and there is parking for 30 cars.

Names and Readings

帆足家本家住宅 is read Hoashi-ke Honke Jūtaku, "residence of the Hoashi head family", and 富春館 is Fushunkan. The Agency for Cultural Affairs lists each building in the form 帆足家本家住宅（富春館）主屋: estate name, the house name in brackets, then the building. On site and in tourist material the usual form is Hoashi Honke Fushunkan, and the main house is often called the omoya.

The place name 中戸次 is read Nakahetsugi. The Hetsugi element is sometimes misread as Totsugi. The branch family's house, 帆足家分家住宅（松石不老館）, also survives in Hetsugi Honmachi and is registered separately.