Saito Family Residence Main Building

A Farmhouse on a Strip of Land

The Saitō Family Residence Main House (齋藤家住宅主屋, Saitōke Jūtaku Shuoku) is a single-storey thatched farmhouse of the late Edo period at Kobari-shinjuku in Ina Town, Kitaadachi District, Saitama Prefecture, entered on the national register as a Registered Tangible Cultural Property on 5 December 2019.

Its plot tells you almost as much as the building does. The house stands on the west side of an old highway on a narrow strip of land, long from front to back and shallow across the frontage, the shape Japanese sources call tanzaku-jō after the slender paper strips used for writing poems. Farm plots along post roads took this form because road frontage was scarce and valuable, and every household wanted some. The house faces east, toward the road.

The roof is thatch, though at present a temporary metal sheet covering protects it. Building area is 164 square metres. On three sides, all but the south, a lean-to extension carries a veranda around the perimeter. Inside, the southern portion is earthen-floored doma, the working space where a farming household did the messy half of its life, and the raised floor beyond it is divided into six rooms in the arrangement known as mutsuma-dori.

The Agency for Cultural Affairs assigns the building to the years 1830 to 1868 and records a renovation in 1982. The register describes it, in its clipped official register style, as a farmhouse that conveys the rural landscape of an earlier era.

How a Building Without a Date Gets Dated

No inscription gives the year this house went up. Nothing in the timber says 1845. So how does anyone arrive at the late Edo period?

Ina Town's account names two lines of evidence, both drawn from the fabric itself. The first is the finish on the structural members: the surfaces carry the marks of the chōna, the Japanese adze, rather than the smooth planing that becomes normal later. Adze work leaves a shallow scalloping that a practised eye reads as easily as handwriting. The second is the nails. They are wanui, hand-forged Japanese nails, square in section and tapered, of a kind superseded by imported wire nails after the country opened to foreign trade. Together the two point to a building put up before the Meiji Restoration.

The interior carries its own hierarchy, legible in the joinery. At the upper end of the front row sits the room the family called the Okunoma, the formal reception space. It has a tokonoma, the recessed alcove for a hanging scroll and a seasonal arrangement, together with shelving and a low writing alcove, and a nageshi runs around the walls: a horizontal member set at the head of the posts, historically a mark of rank in domestic architecture. The other rooms manage without it. There the posts are tied instead by sashigamoi, deep lintel beams that do structural work with no pretension to status.

That contrast is the point. In a farmhouse of this class, the difference between a room finished with nageshi and one held together by sashigamoi records who was received where, and how formally. The Okunoma was for guests who mattered.

Registration in 2019 cited the criterion of contribution to the historic character of the national landscape. The claim being made is not that this is the finest farmhouse in Saitama. It is that this stretch of the old road, with its strip plots and their east-facing houses, is a pattern worth keeping legible, and that this building is part of what keeps it so. The register lists it under number 11-0191, in the ninety-fourth round of registrations.

The Village Behind the House, and Where to Go Instead

Please note at the outset: this is a private residence. It is not open to the public, there are no visiting hours, and there is no arrangement for viewing the interior or the grounds. Anyone in the neighbourhood should respect that entirely and not enter the property or approach the house.

The village history is worth knowing even so, because it explains why a farmhouse of this size stood here at all. Kobari-shinjuku was once part of a single village called Kobari in Ina-no-shō, under the control of the Ōta of Iwatsuki. It became a separate village after the cadastral surveys of the Kanbun era in the 1660s and early 1670s. Administrative control changed hands repeatedly: Iwatsuki domain when the Tokugawa entered Musashi, direct shogunal land from 1619, Oshi domain from 1639, and from 1698 the fief of a hatamoto of the Arakawa house, held by inheritance until the Meiji period.

The village yield was assessed at roughly 534 koku in the Tenpō-era register, a figure confirmed by an 1865 tax settlement document that survives among the Saitō family papers. In the early Meiji years the village counted 102 households and 516 people. A house with a six-room plan and a formal reception room implies a family near the top of that community, and the survival of its documents suggests it held village office.

Two points of local nomenclature. The cultural property register gives the address with the older parcel notation, Kobari-shinjuku, Aza Kamijuku 227, while the town uses the shorter Kobari-shin 227. Both refer to the same site.

For anyone drawn to the area by this building, better destinations lie a short distance away. The Ina Town Museum of Local History covers the town's geography, archaeology, history and folk life, and displays lacquer work by Taguchi Yoshikuni, a Living National Treasure in maki-e connected with the town. Admission is free, and it opens Tuesdays, Wednesdays, Saturdays and Sundays from 9:00 to 16:00, closing on national holidays with two exceptions and over the New Year. The staff there handle the town's cultural property work and can answer questions the register cannot.

The Ina Town Municipal Anniversary Park holds what is described as the largest rose garden in Saitama Prefecture, roughly 4,800 plants across some 400 varieties, at their best from early May to early June and again from late October to mid-November. It is about ten minutes on foot from Uchijuku Station on the New Shuttle line from Ōmiya. Near Maruyama Station on the same line lies the site of the residence of Ina Tadatsugu, the Tokugawa administrator who established a headquarters here in 1591 and from whom the town takes its name.