Former Shima Family Residence (from Hosoiri Village, Nei District, Toyama Prefecture)

A House That Changed Valleys

The Former Shima Family Residence (旧嶋家住宅, Kyū Shima-ke Jūtaku, catalogued by the Agency for Cultural Affairs as 旧嶋家住宅（旧所在　富山県婦負郡細入村）) is an eighteenth-century farmhouse now standing at Ashikuraji, Tateyama Town, Nakaniikawa District, Toyama Prefecture, and designated an Important Cultural Property of Japan on 11 March 1971. It measures 13.7 metres along the ridge by 10.1 metres in depth, under a gable roof with an eave-hood added on the north side.

It was not built here. The house originally stood at Katakake in the former village of Hosoiri, Nei District, on the old Hida Highway close to the Inotani checkpoint, in territory absorbed into Toyama City in 2005. In 1969 a prefectural emergency survey of vernacular houses flagged it as a candidate for national designation. The family gave it to Toyama Prefecture, and the building was taken apart, moved, and reassembled at Ashikuraji, with work beginning in October 1971 and finishing in March 1972 at a reported cost of about ten million yen. Designation came in the middle of that process, in March 1971.

Its new home is the grounds of the Tateyama Museum of Toyama, a museum spread across roughly thirteen hectares of the village that once served as a base for pilgrims climbing Mount Tateyama. The house sits in what the museum calls the Yukai zone, alongside the Mandara Yuen garden, the pilgrim lodging Zendo-bo, and the Former Arima Family Residence.

Town House Outside, Farmhouse Inside

The Agency for Cultural Affairs commentary opens with an observation that sounds almost like a complaint: from the road, this looks like a town house. That impression comes from three features. Sleeve walls rise at each gable end in the manner of udatsu, the fire-break parapets of merchant streets. The front is closed with paired plank doors backed by a single sliding paper screen, and fitted with shitomi, hinged shutters that lift and hook up out of the way. A plank eave carried on projecting purlins runs across the facade.

None of that belongs to an ordinary farmhouse of the Toyama plain. It belongs to a building that faced traffic.

Step through the door and the logic reverses. A wide earth-floored doma runs into the building, with the boarded katte and then the hiroma opening to the right. The plan sits between two regional types that Toyama scholarship distinguishes: the hiroma type of the mountain interior and the tsunoya type of the plains. The designation record treats this in-between condition as the point. The house is a specimen of what happened where a mountain highway ran through, and the national register keeps it as the representative example of that.

The roof reinforces the reading. Its pitch is unusually shallow, an influence the prefecture attributes to Hida across the mountains to the south, and it is finished with planks weighted down by stones. Here the sources part company. The Agency for Cultural Affairs structural field records kokerabuki, thin shingle, with plank roofing on the north eave-hood, while the museum, the prefectural heritage database and local accounts all describe a stone-weighted plank roof. Anyone reading the primary record alongside what is visible on site should expect that difference; the stone-weighted plank roof is what has been renewed in successive repairs.

Repaired in 2025, and Free to Enter

Re-roofing had been carried out at roughly ten-year intervals until 2003, after which it lapsed. Water damage worsened through 2021, and a seismic assessment followed. Repair work funded through the Agency for Cultural Affairs covered re-roofing, re-plastering of the earthen walls, and structural strengthening designed to stay out of sight. The house reopened to visitors on 30 August 2025.

The architect who supervised the work, Yukio Ueno of the Shokugei Gakuin vocational school in Toyama, pointed out afterwards that the frame uses a ridge post cut from a single unjointed length, a medieval technique that survives in Toyama in only a handful of buildings, among them the Important Cultural Property mountain hut at Murodo on Tateyama. His summary of the reason was blunt: heavy wet snow demanded a strong frame.

Admission to the house is free. So are Zendo-bo, the Former Arima Family Residence, the Kyosan-bo lodging and the serow enclosure. The museum's paid facilities are separate, with the exhibition hall at 300 yen for adults and Mandara Yuen at 400 yen. The outdoor buildings close from December through March for winter, and snow fencing or accumulated snow can obstruct viewing from around November until around April, so a visit between late spring and autumn is the safe choice.

A caution worth heeding: in October 2025 an Asiatic black bear was sighted at Mandara Yuen, and the prefecture closed the outdoor facilities, this house included, through 31 March 2026. That period has passed, but conditions of this kind can recur in the region. Check the museum's website before travelling.

Getting there takes some planning. Chigaki Station on the Toyama Chiho Railway Tateyama Line is about two kilometres away on foot, with a town bus running from the station to the Oyama Jinja-mae stop except on Sundays. By car, allow roughly 45 minutes from Toyama Station or about 30 minutes from the Tateyama interchange on the Hokuriku Expressway. Film enthusiasts may recognise the setting: the 2009 production Tsurugidake: Ten no Ki (劔岳 点の記) shot on location in these grounds.