Tsutsui Family Residence Main House

What Is the Tsutsui Family Residence Main House?

The Tsutsui Family Residence Main House (筒井家住宅主屋, Tsutsui-ke Jūtaku Omoya) is the central building of the Tsutsui estate in Nakamozucho, Kita-ku, Sakai City, Osaka; dated by the national register to the early Edo period with late-Edo additions, it became a Registered Tangible Cultural Property on April 3, 2020.

It is a single-storey timber house facing south near the middle of the compound. A thatched (Kayabuki) hip-and-gable roof in the Irimoya-zukuri manner rises over the core, and lean-to eaves (Geya) wrap all four sides. The building covers 290 square meters; the thatched core alone measures 8 bays by 3 bays. Wings project from the north and northeast, the north one linking to the storehouse, while the zashiki wing joins at the southeast.

Inside, a wide earthen-floored work area (Doma) takes up the west side and six rooms in two rows fill the east. The survey recorded the rooms by their family names: a 6-mat Yoritsuki, a Hiroshiki and a small room in the front row; an 8-mat Genkan, an 8-mat Daidokoro and a 6-mat Rokujō behind. The earthen area has since been floored over, apart from the Kadoguchi entry with its big sliding door.

Why It Was Registered: A Land Office in Thatch

The Tsutsui Family Residence Main House was registered as a model of form. The Agency for Cultural Affairs describes it as a reclamation office later adapted as a home and calls it a valuable relic of the history of new-field development. Sakai City adds that it is the oldest building on the property.

Shigeatsu Shimizu's 2025 paper reconstructs the original from traces of alteration. The thatched core was then 6 bays by 3 bays, with just three raised rooms in a single row and everything else earthen floor; only the Yoritsuki had tatami, the rest being narrow board floors 1 bay wide. The Yoritsuki matches the accounts room of the land offices built around Osaka, so the building worked less as a home than as a field office where harvests and dues were reckoned.

Compared with the land offices that survive on the Kawachi plain, Shimizu calls this one simple and primitive in form, an archetype of the reclamation office in the Osaka suburbs.

Early Edo, or Around 1700?

The national register gives the early Edo period, entering 1615 to 1661 as the span in its dates column. No document states when the Tsutsui Family Residence Main House was actually built.

In 2022 three timbers believed to be original were radiocarbon-dated: a hemlock post supporting the rear purlin, the south purlin, and a tie beam carrying the rafters, the last two of red pine. All gave late-seventeenth-century results; allowing for outer rings trimmed away, the trees were felled around 1700.

Shimizu therefore dates the present house to around 1700, which falls neatly within the window of 1681 to 1712 when the family moved out from Sakai. Old maps show an office on the site earlier still, so today's building would be a second-generation office that replaced it. The register's date and the newer estimate are both on record; readers can weigh them side by side.

What to Look For: Thatch, Tile and Two Added Bays

The most striking thing outside is the two-tier roof: thatch above, a skirt of tiles below. At the northeast, a tiled hip-and-gable wing (Hongawarabuki) holds an 8-mat room, a small tiled roof tucked against the great thatch.

The roof frame sets rafter pairs on tie beams laid 1 bay apart between the purlins. The beams are strongly twisted pine; at the northwest corner of the Yoritsuki a post stands on the beam line yet never touches the beam, which has twisted away from it. Shimizu reads this as an older form than in neighboring farmhouses.

The east 2 bays of the thatched core were added in the nineteenth century. Posts in the west 6 bays are 134 millimeters square and heavily weathered, those in the east 129 millimeters and far less worn; the east post lines stand about 40 millimeters south of the west ones, and only the new bays have heavy door-head beams. The extension turned the Tsutsui Family Residence Main House into a dwelling, but the join can still be closed with board doors, keeping office and home apart.

Visiting

The Tsutsui Family Residence Main House is part of a private home and is not open to the public, inside or out. Please do not enter the grounds.

Photographs by Yasushi Ichikawa on the Agency for Cultural Affairs database and Sakai City's page show the south front clearly, including the layered thatch and tile. Access to the estate and general visiting conditions are covered on the Tsutsui Family Residence page.