Former Uchiyama Family Residence Main House

About the Former Uchiyama Family Residence Main House

The Former Uchiyama Family Residence Main House (旧内山家住宅主屋, Kyū-Uchiyama-ke Jūtaku Shuoku) is a large farmhouse built in 1868 at 903 Miyao, Toyama City, Toyama Prefecture, and registered as a Registered Tangible Cultural Property in 1998.

Built by the eleventh family head, Uchiyama Toshihiko, the Former Uchiyama Family Residence Main House is a wooden, tile-roofed building, mostly single-storey with a partial upper floor, covering 860 m². It occupies the middle of the estate. Formal rooms and a study wing were later added on the south side, and the Ōka-no-ma room on the east, giving the house its present shape.

Three Periods Under One Roof

The Former Uchiyama Family Residence Main House was registered as a structure that would be hard to reproduce. The Agency for Cultural Affairs praises the design of the great hall, framed with exceptionally long timbers, and of the shoin study wing, fitted out in choice woods, and notes how clearly each part shows the period in which it was built.

The core dates from 1868, at the very end of the Edo period. The Agency's note places the southern formal rooms and study wing in the mid-1890s and the eastern Ōka-no-ma at the end of the Meiji era (the date field in its database gives around 1887). The Toyama Cultural Foundation says the twelfth head, Gaisen, built the study wing together with an attached tea room.

A farmhouse frame with an open hearth room and a working niwa, the room layout of a headman's house under the domain, and a Meiji landlord's taste in fine timber are all layered into one building. Reading those layers is the pleasure of the house.

From the Great Hall to the Study Wing

In the great hall of the Former Uchiyama Family Residence Main House hangs a wooden plaque reading 柳原草堂, the thatched hall of Yanagihara, written by Kusaba Senzan, a late-Edo scholar of Chinese learning and Gaisen's teacher; the family lived in the hamlet of Yanagihara, and the house was known by that name too. The spears and naginata on the wall came from the Maeda family's collection and were given to the Uchiyama in the mid-Meiji era.

The transom in the formal room is openwork carving in paulownia by Inagaki Saijirō, a craftsman retained by the family in Gaisen's time. Under the stone water basin outside the formal room is a suikinkutsu, a buried jar that makes water drops ring like a koto; the Foundation dates it to around 1897. The basin by the study wing has another from the Taishō era.

Beyond the veranda on the south side, the eaves project a further 4 shaku, about 1.2 metres, over an unusually wide strip of tamped earth, a response to the heavy rain and snow of Hokuriku. The square moon-viewing platform has a floor patterned on a banana leaf.

The 8-mat study has a Tokonoma alcove, staggered shelves and a built-in writing desk (Tsukeshoin); its posts were cut from the dense northern half of Tateyama cedar logs. The Buddhist altar room survives as it was in 1868, with an image received from Nishi Honganji and a shrine cabinet of rosewood.

Seeing the Former Uchiyama Family Residence Main House

The interior of the Former Uchiyama Family Residence Main House is open to visitors. In the great hall, look at the length of the beams and at the plaque and weapons; in the formal room, at the carved transom. Then step onto the veranda to feel the depth of the eaves, and listen for the suikinkutsu near the water basin.

The study wing and the altar room are where the difference between the 1868 core and the Meiji additions is easiest to see; compare the choice of timber in the posts and ceilings. Opening days and admission are on the Former Uchiyama Family Residence (Toyama) page. No official guidance on photography could be found as of September 2026, so ask at the reception.