Sanrakuso Main Building

Sanraku-so Main Building: A Merchant House That Anchors an Old Highway Town

Turn a corner in the old center of Higashijo, and one facade refuses to be missed. The main building of Sanraku-so rises on a bend in the street where two lots meet at an angle, its long east front facing the road that once carried travelers between the San'yo and San'in regions. This is the former Hozawa family residence, built in 1891 by a dealer in kimono cloth and soy sauce, and the largest surviving town house in a district that still keeps the shape of its castle-town past.

The numbers give a sense of its scale. The building runs about 18 meters along its ridge and 17 meters in depth, a two-storey timber structure covering roughly 282 square meters of floor. Higashijo's celebrated master carpenter, Yokoyama Rintaro, directed its construction, and the confidence of that work shows in every part of the exterior.

Why It Earned Registration

Sanraku-so was entered on Japan's register of tangible cultural properties on 26 January 2011, the first property in Higashijo to receive that status. The main building was recognized under the criterion for works that set a standard of form, a category reserved for buildings whose design carries wider influence.

The reason sits on the roof. Rather than a single hip-and-gable, the carpenter layered a lower gable at the front beneath a larger gable that covers the whole roof, a doubled arrangement known locally as yatsumune-zukuri, or "eight-ridge" construction. The second storey is finished as a thick plastered wall in grey lime, and across it run large flower-shaped mushiko-mado, the barred plaster windows typical of merchant houses. Below, the ground floor carries a projecting lattice, and the eaves reach out on exposed purlins coated to the edge in black lime plaster. The effect is heavy and deliberately imposing.

One detail rewards a closer look. Though built as a full two-storey house, the plan keeps the formal reception room only at the rear, an older arrangement that a builder of 1891 could have abandoned but chose to preserve.

What to Notice on a Visit

Interior rooms are open to view without charge, and the timber is the first thing regular visitors mention. Merchants of the period could afford woods now almost impossible to source, and the house uses them freely. Look up in the entrance earth-floored space and you meet a single cypress beam left close to its natural form, its bark merely pared away.

The south face, along the lane leading toward Zenbutsu-ji, repeats the black-plastered, mushiko-windowed treatment of the street front, so the house reads as complete from more than one approach. Walk the interior slowly. Rooms added during the later inn years sit alongside the original spaces, and the change in timber and finish marks where one era of the building gives way to another.

From Shop to Inn to Public House

The Hozawa business combined a cloth shop with soy-sauce brewing, and the main building served as both store and home. After the war, in 1949, the family turned the property into an inn, and for roughly sixty years it lodged people crossing between the coasts. The inn closed in 2010, the building was given to the city of Shobara, and registration followed the next year. It now operates as a municipal cultural facility, open for free.