Fujita Family Residence Main House

The Heart of the Farmstead

The Fujita Family Residence Main House (藤田家住宅主屋, Fujita-ke Jūtaku Shuoku) is a farmhouse built around 1927 in Shinkirai, Kitajima Town, Tokushima Prefecture, and was listed as a Registered Tangible Cultural Property in 2016.

Of the five listed buildings on the Fujita farm, this is the one the family lived in. It stands near the middle of the plot facing south: wooden, 2 storeys, tiled, with a building area of 180 square metres, the largest of the five. Everything else on the property is arranged in relation to it.

It is also, perhaps unexpectedly, the newest. The storehouse and gatehouse date from the Meiji period and the barns from the Taisho years; the Fujita Family Residence Main House came last, so the farm's public face was rebuilt at the start of the Showa era.

Why It Was Registered

The house received registration number 36-0148 in the 85th round of national registrations, dated 2016/11/29, under the criterion of contributing to the historic landscape. The Agency for Cultural Affairs calls it a good example of a modern farmhouse, one that helps define the rural scenery of the Yoshino River delta.

What makes it worth protecting is the balance it strikes. Even at the start of the Showa era the family kept the old farmhouse logic of a doma, an earth-floored work area, under the same roof as the living rooms, yet the upper floor was planned around the rhythms of household life, with generous storage for the changing seasons.

What to Look For

A gabled roof wrapped in lean-to eaves

The main roof is gabled and laid with hongawarabuki pan-and-cover tiles, and a lower geya lean-to runs around all four sides. That two-tier silhouette, a heavy tiled roof with a skirt of eaves beneath it, is the defining profile of the building. The lean-tos shelter the walls from rain and sun and create covered space at ground level, a sensible answer to an open, wind-exposed delta.

An earth floor divided in three

According to the Agency's notes, the doma is partitioned into three rooms. On a farm the earthen floor handled cooking, threshing and tool repair; dividing it suggests that different jobs had their own space.

A seven-mat storeroom upstairs

At the south end of the upper floor is a nando, or storeroom, about seven tatami mats in size, described as the place where fittings were stored when they were swapped each season. Japanese homes traditionally exchanged paper and sliding doors for airy reed screens in summer and back again in autumn, and those panels had to go somewhere. A room this size could hold the whole house's set, and it tells you the Fujita Family Residence Main House was designed with that annual change in mind.

Visiting

This is a private home and the interior is not open to visitors; as of October 2026 we found no announcement of open days. Because the house sits in the middle of the plot, behind the gatehouse and wall on the west side, it is not a building you can take in from the street.

The photographs in the Agency for Cultural Affairs database, supplied by the Kitajima Town Board of Education, show the layered roof clearly and are the best way to see it.