Meiji

A National Treasure: a Southern Song edition of Ouyang Xiu's works, edited by Zhou Bida, once in the medieval Kanazawa Bunko library and nearly complete at Tenri.

Discover the Song Edition of Liu Mengde's Collected Works, a National Treasure held at Tenri University Library in Nara. Printed in 12th-century China, brought to Japan by Zen master Eisai, and once admired by shogun Ashikaga Yoshimitsu, this rare printed book offers a remarkable glimpse into the literary exchange between Tang China and medieval Japan.

Inamiya Butsudan-ten, a National Registered Tangible Cultural Property built in 1905 on Takaoka's historic Yamacho-suji, stands out with its distinctive Western-style facade featuring large arched windows adorned with cast-iron arabesque patterns. This Meiji-era Buddhist altar shop showcases a unique blend of Japanese and Western architecture, with an impressive interior atrium and gallery walkways.

The Ozawa Family Residence Storehouse in Aramachi, Namerikawa City, Toyama Prefecture, is a National Registered Tangible Cultural Property built in the late Meiji period as a shop-storehouse for a kimono fabric merchant. Featuring black lacquer plaster walls, hinged doors, sword-shaped snow-splitting roof tiles, and a graceful curved mukuri roof, this imposing kura showcases the distinctive architectural traditions of the Hokuriku region.

The niwa, or work yard, is the earthen-floored space where the Uchiyama household's farm labour was done, keeping the farming character behind the formal rooms.

The well canopy is the small roofed structure over the estate's well, on the working north side, sheltering the water source that daily life and farm work relied on.

This estate building combines a rickshaw shelter, a driver's hut and a charcoal store in one. The rickshaw points to Meiji, when Uchiyama prosperity peaked.

The rear gate is the household's everyday entrance, opening behind the formal rooms. Where guests used the front gate, family and tradespeople passed through here.

Yauchou is a tea room the twelfth Uchiyama head made from his own study, naming it for rain heard at night. Plain and shoin-like, it adjoins the storehouse.

The storehouse east of the main house is the largest on the Uchiyama estate. One structure outside, it divides within into upper, middle, lower and miso stores.

The chicken coop is the humblest of the estate's registered buildings, kept for eggs and meat and a sign of how fully this farming household provisioned itself.

The east gate opens toward the garden's plum grove and the snow-capped Tateyama range, at the threshold of an early-spring scene of some sixty plum trees.

The inner wall gate is set into a boundary wall within the grounds, dividing the formal, garden and working zones and ordering how people moved through the residence.

Discover Johana-an, a beautifully preserved Meiji-period townhouse in Nanto City, Toyama. This Registered Tangible Cultural Property showcases traditional Johana machiya architecture along the historic temple town of Zentokuji.

Mikuni's 511-metre stone breakwater, designed by Dutch engineer G. A. Escher and founded on woven brushwood, was the first such work in Japan. Completed 1882.

Attached to the Ishida main house, this late-Meiji storehouse was framed from reused sake-brewery timber and fitted with a twelve-mat tatami parlor below. Exterior only.

This early-Meiji long gatehouse fronts the Ishida compound and is said to have been moved from a Fukui samurai residence, its gate under a tiled roof. Exterior only.

This early-Meiji storehouse on the Ishida compound carries local blue-green Shakudani stone along its roof ridge, with a sheltered forecourt on the east. Exterior only.

The former Inoue Dental Clinic in Echizen City, Fukui Prefecture, is a small but remarkable National Registered Tangible Cultural Property built in 1908 after a great fire destroyed much of the town. Behind its Western-style facade, adorned with Tuscan pilasters and a scrolled pediment crafted by master plasterer Ishido Yoshijiro, lies a traditional Japanese dozo (earthen-walled storehouse) structure. Set among historic shrines and preserved merchant districts, the clinic offers visitors a memorable window into Meiji-era provincial architecture.

Built in 1868, the Main House of the Iwano Heizaburo Paper Mill in Echizen, Fukui heads a registered papermaking compound whose kumohada-mashi served Yokoyama Taikan.