Takamuro Family Residence

A Physician's Estate South of Kofu

The Takamuro Family Residence (高室家住宅（山梨県甲府市高室町）) is the estate of a family of physicians of the late Edo to Meiji periods in Takamurocho, Kofu City, Yamanashi Prefecture, and was designated an Important Cultural Property on December 24, 2010 (Agency for Cultural Affairs).

The Agency records nine buildings, the main house, detached wing, gate house, archive storehouse, new storehouse, front storehouse, rice storehouse, miso storehouse and Benzaiten shrine, designated together with a bran store and shed, an inner gate, a written account and three geomantic house plans; the land is also protected; designation number 02564.

Physicians to the Kofu Garrison

The Agency's detailed commentary places the residence in the low centre of the Kofu basin, south of the city. The family is said to have received this land from the Takeda, governors of Kai Province, in 1531; from the early Edo period they practised medicine and made drugs, and after the Kofu domain was abolished in 1724 and placed under the shogunate they were given samurai rank and served as physicians to the Kofu garrison.

The buildings are arranged around the main house on a plot of about 5,000 square metres (Agency for Cultural Affairs). A gate house opens on the south, set back from the road; the main house faces south in the middle, with a detached wing to the west linked by a corridor, storehouses behind, a front storehouse and a bran store to the east of the forecourt, and rice and miso stores and a small shrine to Benzaiten in the back garden.

Why It Is an Important Cultural Property

The Agency values the main house as a rare survivor of a physician's premises of the early modern period, keeping features that came from the medical trade within the usual farmhouse form of the region; the estate, laid out mainly in the Edo period and completed in the Meiji period, keeps buildings for receiving guests and for worship together with a plot division thought to go back to the Middle Ages.

A Main House with a Dispensary

The main house was built in 1788, its entrance added in 1870 (Agency for Cultural Affairs). It measures 18.4 by 9.1 metres under a hip-and-gable thatched roof, now temporarily covered in sheet iron, with a smoke vent at the centre of the ridge. The eastern half is an earth-floored area and the western half raised floor, with a dispensary at the front of the earth floor.

The dispensary keeps built-in medicine chests, and a low loft above was made for drying medicinal herbs, features particular to a physician's house (Agency for Cultural Affairs).

The Wing, the Gate and the Storehouses

The detached wing, remodelled to its present form in 1855, has two formal rooms, a gable decorated with a hanging board and lattice facing the garden, and an alcove, shelves and a desk alcove with a cusped window (Agency for Cultural Affairs). The gate house of 1863 has servants' rooms, a store and a practice room on either side of its passage.

The storehouses follow one after another: the rice store of 1857, the new store of 1877 fitted as a parlour, the front store of 1887, the miso store of 1891 and the archive store of 1908, the same year as the small Benzaiten shrine with its carved tie beam and frog-leg strut (Agency for Cultural Affairs).

What to Look For

Look for the medicine chests of the dispensary and the herb-drying loft above, and the decorated gable of the detached wing (Agency for Cultural Affairs).

Visiting

Yamanashi Prefecture lists it as privately owned. No official information on public access was found.