Tsuyama Castle - Samurai Residences

I don't normally do an album just for samurai residences. If a house remains it will get its own profile. If no house and just a gate I will include them within a castle town album. For Tsuyama Castle, there are so many gates remaining whether there is a house or not that I decided to combine photo

Tsuyama Castle - Samurai Residences

I don't normally do an album just for samurai residences. If a house remains it will get its own profile. If no house and just a gate I will include them within a castle town album. For Tsuyama Castle, there are so many gates remaining whether there is a house or not that I decided to combine photos from both cases into one album to view at once and compare. The first 12 pictures are residences that no longer have a house, only a gate and/or walls remain. The pictures starting with the Noya Residence have full profiles for these residences. You can view those profiles off the main Tsuyama Castle page. Unfortunately none of the residences are open to the public whether lived in or not. There is some consideration to turn these bukeyashiki (samurai residences) into a part of the Tsuyama Castle town tourism but progress is extremely slow and most owners are not willing to participate. The Noya Residence alone has occasional tours sponsored by the city.

With at least one photo for all the bukeyashiki you can roughly see on the map the distribution of samurai homes too. In particular, the Tamachi area held many residences of upper class samurai. All the big nagayamon gates are in the Tamachi area.

Of the pictures below, the first one for the Tabuchi Residence is a nagaymon gate that was recently restored. The house was unfortunately condemned and torn down. In its place there is a small Castle Town Museum(城下町資料館) and a warehouse for festival floats. The next 3 pictures after the Tabuchi Residence gate show a diorama of what it originally looked like and a diagram of a typical samurai residence in Tsuyama.

For the individual residence names, I used the family name if it was used in articles or city documents. Otherwise, I used the address (e.g. Tamachi 72) which is what is used in the city preservation documents.