Tsutsui Family Residence

Tsutsui Family Residence: A Land Office That Became a Village Headman's House

The Tsutsui Family Residence (筒井家住宅, Tsutsui-ke Jūtaku) is an Edo-period estate in Nakamozucho, Kita-ku, Sakai City, Osaka, which grew out of the management office for a reclaimed farming tract called Sekiun-biraki; six of its structures, the main house, zashiki wing, tea room, gate row house, storehouse and earthen wall, were entered as Registered Tangible Cultural Properties on April 3, 2020.

The man behind it was Kijiya Shōemon, a merchant living in the port city of Sakai in the early seventeenth century. The family traces its line to the warlord Tsutsui Junkei, and a family history submitted to the local intendant in 1721 says Shōemon lost his samurai standing in Oda Nobunaga's day, moved to Osaka and then Sakai, and took up trade.

Earthen walls, a moat and thickets of bamboo once sealed the property off, giving it more the air of a rural strongman's compound than a farmhouse. How the buildings actually came together only became clear after a survey carried out in fiscal 2018 by the owners and a research team from the Kyoto Institute of Technology.

Opening Sekiun-biraki

According to a 2025 paper in the journal of the Architectural Institute of Japan by Shigeatsu Shimizu, clearing began around 1623 or 1624 under Takanishi Sekiun, the shogunate's intendant for Sakai, with Shōemon doing the actual work. Historians call this arrangement a daikan mitate shinden: the official picked the land, and a merchant opened it.

The new fields stretched west from the site of today's Tsutsui Family Residence toward what is now JR Mozu Station and the great keyhole tombs attributed to Emperors Richū and Nintoku. First known after the place name as Mandai Shinden, the tract later took the intendant's name; the oldest record using the name Sekiun-biraki dates from 1654.

A building stood on the site by 1679, but the family still lived in Sakai and treated it as a field office. Shimizu places their move out to Sekiun-biraki sometime between 1681 and 1712. A census from 1712 counts just five households in the whole tract, only one of them landholding, and that one is thought to be Shōemon's.

When the Buildings Went Up

The national register dates all six structures to the Edo period: the main house to the early Edo period, the zashiki wing, gate row house and wall to the mid-Edo period, and the tea room and storehouse to the late Edo period. Sakai City describes the main house as the oldest building on the property.

Later research has refined that picture. In 2022 timbers from the main house were radiocarbon-dated, and Shimizu's paper combines the results with physical evidence of alterations. In his reading, a thatched main house was rebuilt as the land office around 1700; a family wing, the future zashiki wing, went up beside it at the same time or shortly after; in the first half of the nineteenth century that wing gained a formal entrance and became reception rooms, while the main house was extended east to join it; and the tea room followed around the mid-nineteenth century.

Step by step, then, an office became a home and the home became the seat of a village headman. Where the register's dates and the newer estimates differ, the page for each building sets out both.

Layout: From the Outer Gate to the Main House

The old Nishi-Kōya Kaidō road runs east to west along the north side of the Tsutsui Family Residence. A lane parallel to the road leads to an outer gate, and beyond it a broad path turns south. East of the path lies the walled core of the estate, about 60 meters by 40 meters, once ringed by a moat that still survives in part on the south side; west of the path is the Gobyō-omotezuka burial mound.

Follow the path south and turn east at the southwest corner of the zigzagging wall to reach the gate row house. Inside, the main house faces south near the center of the compound, the zashiki wing runs off to the southeast in an L, the tea room is tucked against the zashiki wing's northeast corner, and the storehouse stands just north of the main house. Sakai City suggests the many turns of path and wall, which recall castle defenses, may have been meant to express the family's claimed warrior lineage.

A plan of the house drawn in 1883 shows a property of almost exactly today's extent. Of the buildings on it, two storehouses and a barn on the west side and three small shrines in the southeast corner are gone; the rest still stand.

The outer gate is not among the six registered structures, but it was once the formal front gate of the Tsutsui Family Residence and is thought to date from the very end of the Edo period; its roof tiles carry stamps naming Sakai tile makers. In front of the gate row house spreads the Mozu camphor tree, a prefectural Natural Monument long revered by local farmers as a tree that could bring rain.

The Tsutsui Family in the Modern Era

When the Imperial Household Ministry took over the care of imperial tombs in the Meiji era, it relied on local men for the day-to-day work. In 1895 the head of the family, Tsutsui Kōshirō, was hired as a tomb warden; he rose through the ranks and helped look after the tomb attributed to Emperor Nintoku, among others, until his death in 1922.

The family still holds his letters of appointment and commendations, along with the oldest known map of the Mozu tomb group and a drawing of grave goods found at the Nintoku tomb. Sakai City notes that the Gobyō-omotezuka mound next door survived partly because the Tsutsui family used it as farmland and a hill for children to play on.

Visiting the Tsutsui Family Residence

The Tsutsui Family Residence is still a private home, and neither the buildings nor the gardens are open to the public; the Osaka Cultural Properties Navi site, run by the Osaka association of architects and partner groups, lists it as closed. Please do not enter the property. Questions about access can go to Sakai City's Cultural Properties Division (072-228-7198).

The Gobyō-omotezuka mound immediately to the west reopened after restoration on April 26, 2025, and is freely accessible. Sakai City presents it as a starting point for walks around the eastern side of the Mozu tomb group and names the Tsutsui Family Residence and the Mozu camphor tree as sights close by.

The nearest stations are Nakamozu on the Nankai Kōya Line and Nakamozu on the Osaka Metro Midōsuji Line; from either, walk about 400 meters west. By Nankai bus, get off at Nakamozu-chō and walk about 300 meters north. There is no parking at the mound or the house, so come by public transport.

If you take photographs, keep to public roads and the open park, and do not point your camera into the grounds or at residents. Exterior photographs of each building can be seen on the Agency for Cultural Affairs database and on Sakai City's page.