Yatagai Family Residence

The Layout of the Yatagai Family Residence

The Yatagai Family Residence (矢田貝家住宅, Yatagai-ke Jūtaku) is a landowning family's estate in Kamihosomi, Hōki Town, Saihaku District, Tottori Prefecture, built around a main house of 1854, and its eight buildings were registered as Registered Tangible Cultural Properties in 2011.

The estate sits on flat land on the right bank of the Hino River, at the western foot of Mount Daisen, and fronts National Route 181. Hōki Town notes that the road here follows the line of the Izumo Kaidō, a highway of the Edo period.

Walk in from the road and the buildings appear roughly in sequence. The Nagayamon Gate, a gatehouse with rooms on either side of the passage, stands along the road. Behind it the Main House faces east across the forecourt. Between the two, a smaller Garden Gate with walls running off to each side divides the forecourt from the main garden. The Storehouse stands behind the Main House, facing north.

The Annex is joined to the south side of the Main House. A wall runs from the front of the Annex toward the tea house, and the Middle Gate opens in that wall. Through it lies the Roji, the garden path of a tea house, with the Koshikake Machiai waiting bench partway along and the tea house known as Kanpū-an at the end. Front gate and house, the storehouse at the back, and a tea quarter to the south: the Yatagai estate falls into three distinct zones.

History of the Yatagai Family Residence

Hōki Town records the Yatagai as a family said to have been involved in tatara iron smelting, who built their house on this site in the Kaei era at the close of the Edo period. A family history published by a Shimane University research group in 2026 gives the date more precisely: the founder of this branch bought land in Kamihosomi in 1854 and set up his own household. A ridge tag in the low upper floor of the Main House carries the same year.

The household grew rich through peddling, money-lending and brewing. In the Meiji era it made sake and soy sauce, and it later became a landlord family living mainly on rents from tenant farmland. Tottori Prefecture likewise introduces the Yatagai Family Residence as the home of a family of landowners and brewers.

In the Meiji era the yard was crowded with working buildings: sake and soy-sauce storehouses, a charcoal shed, a retirement house for the older generation and more. Their positions can be read from house-divination plans kept by the family and from the map attached to a property transfer deed of 1883. Most of them disappeared long ago, and the last of the rice stores and carpenters' sheds were taken down between 1988 and 1991.

The estate seen today was shaped by the fourth head of the family (1905 to 1992). He extended the grounds to the east and south, laid out a garden of front garden, back garden and tea garden to his own design, and kept the work going for more than ten years from about 1928. His diary, read by the architectural historian Fujiki Tatsuya, dates the buildings: the Garden Gate in 1931, the tea room of the Annex between 1931 and 1933, Kanpū-an in 1938, the Middle Gate and the Koshikake Machiai in 1939, and the moving and rebuilding of the Nagayamon Gate in 1940 and 1941. He finished each part of the garden first and set the buildings into it afterwards.

When he moved to Tokyo in 1985, the house was left empty. The Western Tottori Earthquake of 2000 damaged, among other things, posts of the Nagayamon Gate. From 2001 the estate was let as a soba restaurant and a cultural exchange space, and tenants and uses have changed several times since.

A survey of the buildings by the Tottori Prefectural Board of Education and specialists in 2010 led to the registration of all eight on July 25, 2011. In April 2025 the garden itself, 4,397.55 square meters taking in the front garden, back garden and tea garden, was designated a Tottori Prefecture cultural property as the Yatagai-shi Teien, the Yatagai Garden.

The Eight Registered Buildings of the Yatagai Family Residence

All eight buildings of the Yatagai Family Residence were added to the register of Registered Tangible Cultural Properties on July 25, 2011, under the consecutive numbers 31-0165 to 31-0172, each for its contribution to the historic landscape. The dates and sizes below follow the Agency for Cultural Affairs database.

• Yatagai Family Residence Main House: 1854; building area 204 m²
• Yatagai Family Residence Nagayamon Gate: mid-Meiji period, moved within the estate in the early Shōwa period; building area 24 m²
• Yatagai Family Residence Garden Gate: mid-Meiji period; opening 2.2 m wide
• Yatagai Family Residence Storehouse: mid-Meiji period; two-story earthen-walled storehouse; building area 50 m²
• Yatagai Family Residence Annex: early Shōwa period; building area 46 m²
• Yatagai Family Residence Middle Gate: early Shōwa period; opening 1.2 m wide
• Yatagai Family Residence Koshikake Machiai: early Shōwa period; building area 6.8 m²
• Yatagai Family Residence Tea House (Kanpū-an): early Shōwa period; building area 18 m²

Recent work with the fourth head's diary has narrowed several of these dates. For the Garden Gate, which the national database places in the mid-Meiji period, the diary records the building of a gate in 1931. Each building's page sets out the evidence.

Tottori Prefecture values the estate for keeping a traditional late-Edo farmhouse of the region together with a full set of early-Shōwa outbuildings, and describes it as a residence that still carries the atmosphere of the modern era.

Visiting the Yatagai Family Residence

The Yatagai Family Residence is privately owned and is not regularly open as a cultural property. Since 2001 the house has been let out from time to time as a restaurant or event space. The regional shop guide SANIN HANKA Guide lists the Morinomegumi TeaSalon inside the house as open on Fridays and Saturdays from 9:00 a.m. to 5:00 p.m., with admission of 500 yen (free for preschool children). The listing carries no date, so check with the salon, or with the Hōki Town Board of Education lifelong learning office (0859-62-0712), before you set out.

Please stay out of the grounds outside opening hours. The Nagayamon Gate on the road, and the front of the Main House beyond it, can be seen from National Route 181. No photography policy is published; ask whoever is looking after the house that day.

The nearest station is Hōki-Mizoguchi on the JR Hakubi Line. The Yatagai Family Residence lies about 1.1 km north-northwest of the station in a straight line, on National Route 181. A feature on the tea salon mentions parking but gives no number of spaces.