Former Wada Residence (Kurosuke's House) Main Building

A Meiji Farmhouse That Was Moved Here for Tea

The Main House of the Former Wada Residence (旧和田家住宅（クロスケの家）主屋, Kyū Wada-ke Jūtaku Shuoku, also written Kyu Wadake Jutaku and known locally as Kurosuke no Ie) is a two-storey timber farmhouse in the Mikajima district of Tokorozawa City, Saitama Prefecture, built around 1902 and entered on the national register of Tangible Cultural Properties on 21 June 2013.

The building did not start life on this plot. Fire took the previous main house in 1955. Rather than commission a new one, the Wada family acquired a house standing in the town of Ogose, elsewhere in Saitama, took it apart and re-erected it here in 1957. Timber-frame construction makes that kind of move possible, and it was common enough in rural Japan that a specialist word exists for it: hikiya. The house you see today is therefore the second main house on a site the family had occupied since the closing years of the Edo period.

It faces south at the centre of the compound, roofed in sangawara-buki pantiles over a simple gable, with a low lean-to roof called a geya running around the perimeter. Registered building area is 211 square metres.

What the Wada family did for a living shaped every part of the plan. Tokorozawa sat at the centre of Sayama tea production from the early Meiji era onward, and the household worked its way through silk and then tea across several generations. The sixth head of the family took up sericulture and silk reeling and began growing tea; in 1902 he put up a silkworm rearing room on the western side of the plot and planted mulberry. By the Taisho era the ninth head was processing tea alongside the silkworms. Tea cultivation continued under the Wada family until the early 2000s.

Registered, Not Designated: What the Status Means

Japan's heritage system separates two things that English-language sources often blur together. National Treasures (国宝) and Important Cultural Properties (重要文化財) are designated: the state selects them for outstanding value and imposes strict controls on any alteration. Registered Tangible Cultural Properties (登録有形文化財), the category this house belongs to, work the other way round. Registration is a lighter instrument, introduced in 1996 for buildings roughly fifty years old or more, and it leaves owners free to keep using and adapting their property while offering guidance and a measure of public recognition. The system was built for exactly this situation: an ordinary working building whose value lies in what it records rather than in artistic distinction.

The main house was registered under the criterion of contributing to the historic landscape of the country, with registration number 11-0127. It came through in the 75th round of registrations, together with the tea factory and the storehouse on the same compound.

The reason given by the Agency for Cultural Affairs turns on the floor plan. Divide the building in half. The eastern half holds the doma, a working floor of packed earth at ground level, along with the office. The western half sits on a raised timber floor and follows the seikei yomadori layout, a regular four-room grid that was standard in Japanese farmhouses, with a lean-to about 2.7 metres deep running along the rear.

The unusual part is the size of that doma. Across most of Japan, farmhouse earth floors shrank steadily through the nineteenth and twentieth centuries as households moved cooking and work elsewhere. Here it stayed large, because picked tea leaves had to be spread out thin and turned by hand. That single decision, to keep a big earthen floor at a time when neighbours were reducing theirs, is what makes the building a document of farming in the southern hills of Saitama.

Reading the House as a Workplace

Step onto the earth floor and look up. The principal post, the daikokubashira, is zelkova, 33 centimetres on a side. Posts of that scale were a statement of means as much as structure, and this one has the dark patina that comes from a century of hearth smoke rather than stain.

The walls repay a slow circuit of the exterior. They combine oshibuchi shitami ita-bari, horizontal boarding held by vertical battens, with panels of white lime plaster. Both were ordinary rural finishes, and seeing them side by side on one elevation gives a fair picture of how a Saitama farmhouse actually looked before mid-century.

Inside, the veranda, the sunken hearth and the painted sliding-door panels have all been kept. A renovation begun in December 2005 reinforced the upper floor and fitted wooden lattice to the windows, and the Agency's record notes further repair work in 2011.

The detail worth carrying with you is what happened here every spring in the 1950s. Straw mats went down on the earth floor and under the eaves, and fresh leaves were spread across them. In a heavy year that was not enough space, so the household lifted the tatami from the ten-mat reception room and the living room, laid bare boards, and covered those with mats too. The Wada family bought in leaf from neighbouring farms as well as picking their own, and the volume arriving at once was more than the working floor could hold. Fresh leaf ferments and heats as it sits, so someone had to keep turning it by hand to let air through. For a few weeks a year the formal rooms of the house stopped being rooms at all.

Visiting takes some planning. The compound is open Tuesdays, Wednesdays and Saturdays, in a morning session from 10:00 to 12:00 and an afternoon session from 13:00 to 15:00, and admission is by advance reservation only through the operator's booking calendar. Last entry is 11:30 in the morning and 14:30 in the afternoon. Admission is 500 yen for elementary school age and above, cash only, with 40 places per session. Roughly once a month a guided special opening runs for about an hour and a half at 1,000 yen for 15 people. Groups of ten or more apply separately at least a week ahead. Photography for personal use is permitted; commercial use of images taken on site is not, and commercial tours are not accepted. The site closes on public holidays, over Obon and at New Year, and occasional unscheduled closures happen, so the calendar is worth checking before you set out.

There is no car park. Take the Seibu Ikebukuro Line to Kotesashi Station, then a bus bound for Waseda University or Miyaderanishi, and get off at Dainichido; the compound is about five minutes on foot. The nearby coin parking fills quickly, particularly on Saturdays. Bring insect repellent in summer and something warm in winter, as the buildings have no air conditioning.