Meiji
明治Browse Japan’s cultural heritage from the Meiji period (1868 – 1912). Filter by prefecture, type, and keyword, with concise stories, maps, and travel tips.
Built in 1886 and finished in the same black plaster as the shop beside it, this Aizuwakamatsu storehouse held goods on one side and the family altar on the other.
Built in 1908 in Shirakawa, Fukushima, this two storey storehouse holds a formal parlour finished in ebony. Registered in 2024, it is now the Fujita Memorial Museum.
Two tiny 1888 shrines on one stone plinth in the Heishi estate, Fukushima City, one to a land deity, one to the Thirty-Three Kannon, together just 0.34 sq m.
A 13-by-6-bay Meiji farmhouse in Fukushima City with a monitor roof and silkworm-rack marks on its beams, the only Heishi building registered as a model of form.
An early Meiji gatehouse fronting the Heishi estate in Fukushima City, white plaster over weatherboard, with a latticed door, cattle shed and store either side.
The oldest of four listed buildings at this Higashiyama Onsen inn, built between 1897 and 1906, its frame by a Tokyo carpenter and its fittings by an Aizu joiner.
A mid-Meiji storehouse with formal rooms in Narukawa, Fukushima City, joined to an early Showa altar room with a dais, coved ceiling, cusped windows and fan rafters.
A two-storey thatched house of 1912 in Narukawa, Fukushima City, 24 m long, with an azuma-zukuri roof lifted over the earth floor and four rows of rooms.
The Wakaki Shoten Work Storehouse is a late Meiji plastered storehouse in Kitakata, split into a bottling room and a street-side shipping store. Not normally open.
The Wakaki Shoten Zashiki Storehouse is a 1904 timber-framed brick building in Kitakata with a striped persimmon room, seen free through glass, and a balcony porch.
The Wakaki Shoten Brewing Hall is a late Meiji timber brewery in Kitakata, a 10-meter trussed space with a raised platform and a brick chimney. Not normally open.
The Wakaki Shoten Brick Storehouse is a 3-story tool store built in 1904 in Kitakata, the first private building of local brick. Its ground floor is open free.
The Wakana Family Residence Brick Workshop Storehouse in Kitakata, built in 1910, is the oldest and largest of the family's four brick kura, with arched lean-tos.
Built in 1890 at Umeta in Sukagawa, Fukushima, this small earthen storehouse wears namako tilework below and white lime above. Registered 2005; exterior views only.
The largest of three storehouses at a former headman's yard in Sukagawa, Fukushima, this early Meiji kura keeps mid-coat earth walls and a roof clear of the shell.
Ten square metres of early Meiji board walls beside the farmyard gate: the Watanabe Family Residence Paddy Granary in Okuma, Fukushima, registered in 2021.
A gate built without doors and thirty-eight metres of board fence: the late Meiji frontage of the Watanabe Family Residence in Okuma, Fukushima, registered in 2021.
The Esaki Lighthouse of 1871 at the north tip of Awaji, guarding the Akashi Strait, is one of Japan's first Western lighthouses, built under Richard Henry Brunton.
The former Kodera stables of about 1907 in Kobe's Sorakuen, brick stables attributed to Kawai Kozo, have a spiral stair tower and grooms' rooms upstairs.
The former Hassam house of 1902 in Kobe's Sorakuen, built in Kitano by the Englishman Hassam to designs by Hansell, is one of the finest foreigners' houses in Kobe.