Muroya no Sono Merchant Mansion and Gardens

 

This is one of the largest Edo-period merchant residences in all of Japan that still stands.

It is located in Yanai, a small river port on the south coast of Yamaguchi Prefecture.

Muroya was the trading name for the Oda Family who were one of the biggest oil traders in Western Japan.

As far as I have been able to ascertain, the primary oil traded would have been rapeseed oil, which I believe is marketed as canola oil in the west. The Japanese rarely used oil in cooking, so its main use would have been lighting.

At their peak the Oda family owned a fleet of 50 trading ships and operated over the area from Kyushu to Osaka.

The property is open to the public as a museum, and was so full of features and displays that I have split it into two large separate posts.

The property is huge, encompassing more than 2,500  square metres and with internal floorspace of more than 1,500 square metres.

The street frontage was 14 meters wide, but the property extended 119 meters ( see second photo of the post)

Such a long, narrow property was known as "sleeping palce of an eel"

It consists of 11 buildings with a total of 35 rooms.

As well as the main family residence, there is a main warehouse, an accounting house, a rice warehouse, and a tooshed.

Additionally there are stables, tenements for servants and workers, and an oil-pressing room.

Most of the rooms are filled with artifacts and displays relating to the room, and I will cover these in the next post.

There are several gardens, a large one planted in the main courtyard area, another for the main house, and several "pocket" gardens .

The property is next to the river at the eastern end of the historic trading town of Yanai.

It is a Historic Preservation District known for its white walls and goldfish lanterns.

I will cover Yanai in later posts. I like Yanai a lot and I highly recommend a visit.

I was visiting early on day 19 of my walk along the Chugoku Kannon Pilgrimage. The previous post was on my walk down the coast to Yanai from Iwakuni.

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Yuasa Birthplace of Soy Sauce

 

Yuasa is a small town and port on the coast of Wakayama and once a resting point on the Kiiji Route of the Kumano Kodo, which was the reason I was visiting.

Enough of the old town and its architecture remain so that Yuasa was registered as an Historic Preservation Distrist, the only one in the whole prefecture.

Some of the preservation districts are big tourist spots, like Gion, or Kurashiki, and they are filled with cafes and souvenir shops, but Yuasa is more the kind I prefer, somewhat run-down and with few outsiders....

More recently, Yuasa was registered as  a Japan Heritage Site, and so the increased funding and exposure has brought more visitors and some gentrification.

The reason is that Yuasa has a claim to be the birthplace of soy sauce.

According to the story, a Buddhist monk settled in Yuasa in the 13th century after returning from his studies in Chima.

He brought back a style of miso-making called kinzanji in Japanese. This produced a small amount of liquid that proved to be delicious as seasoning, so the local miso makers created a production method that increased the amount of this liquid, and so soy sauce was born.

Soy sauce production grew in the town with about 90 companies operating here in the Edo Period.

Only a handful remain, with Yuasa Soy Sauce Company being the biggest.

The tone hosts what it called the Seiro Museum. Seiro are wooden trays used in the production of soy sauce.

They are used as a frame to make displays of things related to everyday life in Yuasa.

They can be found throughout the historic district.

Since I visited there are now various ways to delve more deeply into the history of Soy in Yuasa, including factory tours.

Also, like Shodoshima and other locations in Japan, soy sauce-flavoured ice cream is on sale.

The first photo of the post, and the last couple, show the Kadocho Soy Sauce Brewery.

The previous post in this series on walking the Saigoku Pilgrimage and Kumano Kodo was on Jinsenji Temple in Yuasa.