Former Yanagawa Family Residence (from Kuroe, Kainan)

A Lacquer Merchant's Estate, Built in 1807

The Former Yanagawa Family Residence (旧柳川家住宅, Kyu-Yanagawa-ke Jutaku) stands in the Kii Fudoki no Oka park at Iwase, Wakayama City, Wakayama Prefecture, was built in 1807, and was designated an Important Cultural Property in two stages: the main house on 12 March 1969 and the front storehouse on 17 June 1970. The designation number is 01710, the category is pre-modern folk dwelling and the quantity is two buildings, with a household plan drawing registered as attached property.

Neither building began life on this hillside. Both stood for more than a century and a half in Kuroe, a lacquerware quarter of the neighbouring city of Kainan, before being dismantled and rebuilt here.

The Yanagawa made and sold Kishu lacquerware in Kuroe across many generations, each head of the house taking the name Heibei. Family records state that the fourth Heibei acquired the plot and built the estate in 1807. The site lay on Kawabata-dori, the street following the artificial canal that ran through the centre of Kuroe, and the western edge of the plot faced an inlet said to have served as a landing. For a lacquerware wholesaler, the way out to the water mattered as much as the shopfront.

From Building to Estate: How the Designation Grew

Few Edo-period townhouses survive this complete in Wakayama Prefecture. The national database treats this one as typical of the province's surviving merchant houses, and the grounds for that judgement come down to three points: the timber was carefully selected, the design is coherent without strain, and the original plan survived later alterations legibly enough to be read.

The interesting part is why the front storehouse was added fifteen months later. The Agency for Cultural Affairs states the reason plainly: it was built in 1807 at the same time as the main house, and it is important for preserving the estate arrangement of a townhouse.

That reasoning is worth pausing over. Designation is normally granted building by building; here the unit of judgement was the estate. The main house alone is one example of a northern Kii townhouse. The storehouse alone is a two-storeyed earthen-walled store. With both in place, the way a lacquer wholesaler arranged trade and domestic life becomes readable. What the 1970 addition protected was that completeness.

Wakayama Prefecture acquired the property from its owners, moved it from Kuroe in the 1969 fiscal year and carried out restoration at the same time. The attached household plan drawing shows how the occupants themselves understood the layout, offering a line of research separate from the buildings.

The Main House: Reading the Plan from the Doorway

Stand at the front and the organisation is immediately clear. A large doorway opens on the left, and from it an earth-floored passage runs straight through to the back. To the right of that passage, four rooms sit in two rows of two, the arrangement likened to the character for rice field.

The division of those four rooms states the family business. The two on the street side, the mise and the mise-oku, were for trade; the two behind, the daidokoro and the nando, were for the household. Customers and goods stayed at the front; domestic life withdrew one room deeper. Behind the four, a Buddhist altar room and a guest wing project further back, and beyond the passage at the rear lie the well and the bath and privy block. The plan is standard for a northern Kii townhouse; surviving this completely is not.

Look at the roof from the side and the building changes character partway along. The living block runs 10.6 metres by 7.9, two storeys, gabled, with pent roofs east and west and a roof of formal tile, the heavy combination of round and flat tiles that suits a face presented to the street. The guest wing joining behind is smaller, 9.8 metres by 4.9, hip-and-gable in stepped form, with a pent roof to the north and a lighter pantile covering, connecting to the living block on the west.

The contrast is deliberate. A merchant's street front had to look solid. The room where guests were received opened toward the garden rather than the road, and its roof could afford to be modest. Some accounts hold that the guest wing was finished a little after the living block, though the national database records both as 1807.

The Front Storehouse: Built to the Same Frontage

The storehouse measures 10.6 metres by 5.9, two storeys, gabled, roofed in formal tile. It is built in dozo construction: a timber frame packed thickly with earth and finished in plaster.

Set that first figure beside the main house. The living block also runs 10.6 metres along the front. The two buildings share a frontage width. The match is too exact to be accidental, and the natural reading is that the whole estate was laid out as one campaign.

Fire was the reason a store like this was wanted. Kuroe was a town of workshops and houses packed along narrow lanes, and for a wholesaler, losing stock meant losing the business. Thick walls also hold interior conditions steadier than a timber building does, which suited a house dealing in lacquer.

The storehouse stands across a courtyard from the rear of the main house, its white plaster wall closing the far side of the garden. Stand in that courtyard and something becomes clear that no floor plan conveys. The earth-floored passage through the main house leads to the well at the back, with the bath and privy block opening off it. The storehouse sits beyond the courtyard, far enough that fire in one is unlikely to reach the other, close enough to move goods in and out without crossing open ground in the rain.

This is where the reconstruction at Kii Fudoki no Oka earns its keep. Wakayama Prefecture did not simply move two designated buildings and set them near each other. The store, the bath and the privy were all reinstated, reproducing a merchant's plot entire, so visitors walk the same distances the household walked daily.

The Setting, and Planning a Visit

Kii Fudoki no Oka opened in August 1971 as a prefectural museum park established to conserve and present the Iwase Senzuka tumulus group, a Special Historic Site. Its 67 hectares run from a hill of 150 metres down the northern slope, scattered with some five hundred burial mounds of varying size.

The relocated houses stand together at the foot. Next to the Yanagawa estate is the Former Taniyama Family Residence, a fisherman's house of 1749 moved from Shiotsu in Shimotsu, Kainan City, also an Important Cultural Property, together with two prefecturally designated farmhouses. A lacquer merchant's townhouse, a coastal fishing house and inland farmhouses can be seen in sequence, which repays the trip more than any single building would. The park also holds a garden of plants named in the Man'yoshu.

One caveat before travelling. The park's exhibition hall closed on 31 March 2026 for reconstruction and is due to reopen in the second half of 2028 as the Wakayama Prefectural Museum of Archaeology and Folklore. During the works only the old hall and part of the construction area are off limits, and the relocated houses remain reachable on foot. Two side effects: the vending machines were removed in April 2026, so bring your own water, and the Tennozuka tumulus is closed to visitors through the 2026 fiscal year for conservation work.

The gates open at 9:00 a.m. and close at 4:30 p.m., with the relocated houses admitting visitors until 4:15 p.m. The park closes on Mondays, or the following weekday when a Monday falls on a public holiday, and from 29 December to 3 January.

By public transport, take the bus for Kii Fudoki no Oka from stand 5 at the east exit of JR Wakayama Station, about twenty minutes. Services are thin, so a call to Wakayama Bus on 073-445-3131 is worth the trouble. A taxi from the same exit takes about ten minutes, and JR Tainose Station is about two kilometres away for anyone happy to walk. By car it is five minutes from the Wakayama interchange of the Hanwa Expressway, with free parking for 87 vehicles from 8:00 a.m. to 6:00 p.m.

Whether interiors are open depends on the season and on any programme running at the time; the park sometimes holds guided events at the relocated houses. A call to 073-471-6123 will confirm both what is open and whether photography is permitted.