Traditional Japanese House Tour (An Abandoned Estate, Recently Restored)

This is Sasuichi, a 600-year-old

estate

in the village of Aoubara, Japan. This

estate

consists of a huge 14-room mansion with a carriage

house

, a tea

house

, two storerooms, a pantry, a fox sanctuary and an outdoor pond. The estate sat

abandoned

until it was

recently

purchased by an unlikely buyer and got much more than she bargained for. Hi, I'm Shelley Clark, I'm American, originally from Maine, but I've lived here in Japan since 2003. I originally bought another house in town, but I loved it. that when this property, which is really like a local treasure, became available, I decided I could get it too, but I was walking around one winter day and I decided to look in the windows and I discovered that, you know, the house was just

abandoned

.

It hadn't really been cleaned and there were animals that had gotten into the house and we were living and messing up the roof and the floor and stuff and I thought, "someone really needs to take over this property because it's like a local treasure, someone should turn this at an inn or a restaurant and start talking to the neighbors about it. You know, someone should do this and they just looked at me like I was crazy and I kept saying someone should do it and I was like, oh, I guess that would be it. Yo, this is the gamecon or the

traditional

entrance to the house and you can get an idea of ​​the sturdiness of the house by the beams and the roof, this type of wood is just not found easily anymore in Japan, I guess it was abundant in. that time and this family's business was selling wood from the land they owned, so they were really trying to show the quality of the wood to the people who came to visit the house, these doors are very, I'm told they are. very valuable, I don't really know but they are worth at least a couple thousand dollars each, now I'm not sure what they are made of but they were actually all in good shape so we just cleaned them which was a bit difficult with the toothbrush, but they still look great from the genkan entrance and I assume that the very special guests who were allowed into the house would be escorted.

I walked into this room that once had a smaller irori that, like many Japanese houses, was covered because no one used it anymore, but I thought it would be nice to recreate that kind of rory feeling, so there's something about a rory. that the Japanese just want to come in and sit down, especially if there's burning coal, this is called jizzai, it's um, I think it's 90 centimeters from the tip of the tail to the nose and the interesting thing about these jizzai is um. They are always fish and this is a carp but sometimes they are golden but they always have this little red or sometimes it is not painted red but this is a kind of red ball in the mouth and it is supposed to symbolize that it is eating fire. and it's eating fire because it's protecting the house from the fire that could start by burning the embers and burning the charcoal in the rory, so it's like a kind of protective symbol and that plate was found in a warehouse in a wooden box that didn't I know the age of the plate, but the box had the date written on it and the date was 1893.

One of the things we found were three swords and they look very old and we didn't know how valuable they were, but some of these guys may be worth like thirty thousand dollars, so the first thing I had to do was register them with the police because they're weapons, so I thought, oh, I'll go to the police station, so I had them in this little cloth bag and I went to the police station. police thinking very naively, I actually checked in at the police welcome desk and said I had swords to check in, it was like I suddenly knew this was not going to be what I expected. and they almost arrested me because I was bringing dangerous weapons to the police station and I couldn't establish that they were mine because I didn't have a permit or anything so they took them from me, they confiscated them.

They wouldn't let me touch them anymore and they said we're going to do an incident report on this, we're going to investigate the place where you found the swords and I was like, oh okay, when now the police car followed me with its lights. um shot, you know, the red lights that were spinning on top of the car followed me back to the town and they did an investigation of this house and where we found the swords and then they wouldn't allow me to take the swords back into my possession until I had them They would appraise them and if they were evaluated as valuable cultural artifacts, they could receive them from the police.

If they were not valuable cultural artifacts, the police were going to destroy them, so fortunately they were evaluated as valuable and one of them there are hundreds, so to determine the monetary value you have to polish them and it will cost between five and ten thousand dollars to polish them to determine the quality of the sheets, so I haven't saved the money to do that. Yes, but someday I'll polish them up and maybe I'll find out they're worth a lot of money, so this is a series of three really big Japanese tatami rooms and this is where the family held their gatherings and their ceremonies.

I've seen some photographs of about 30 people in this room gathered around the altar, probably at some kind of family memorial occasion. The ceiling is very high for a Japanese house and this is what we see. 2 4 6 8 11 12 tatami matte room This is the altar that the family honored their ancestors with, I was told, it was brought from Kyoto in the 1950s for a price at the time that was equivalent to $3,30,000. Americans, so it's a lot of money even now, so it has surprising resonance. I still hear it, yeah, the villagers always save this, so I think they don't like me playing with it.

It's probably very important in Buddhism and I shouldn't mess around with it, but I think this sounds really good right now. I began to wonder how expensive it must be to buy a property of this size, however the answer may surprise you: the family was not very popular with the surrounding villagers because they had been the lords of the area and perhaps, you know, They were very focused. They depended on their own wealth and didn't help other people much, so when the family you know died out and got smaller and smaller and the younger children moved away, they didn't really want to come back to this town because there were no good feelings among them. them and the other people in the village, so when the last resident of this house died, it was just abandoned and the rest of the family was just a burden to them, you know, when a house gets old and animals get into it, it becomes like a danger, so they felt like they had some responsibility, but they still didn't want to take it, so they just left it as it was, so it was actually a little difficult for me to contact them because no one was in contact with them .

But once he did, they discovered that he was serious and that he had the money and had lived in the town, so there would be no problem if they sold it to me. I'm happy to sell it to him and I bought it for very, very little, actually a hundred thousand dollars, so this is a koto, it's two meters long, so it barely fits in my little mini car if I have to take it somewhere and the interesting. The thing about this is that I've always loved the koto, but I never dreamed that I would ever play one and there was one like all the strings were broken and everywhere in the cabin, so I thought, wow!

I just repaired it and I can use it as a decorative item so I took it to this koto shop in Shizuoka and the guy was like you know this is a really valuable koto you should play it and I was like me but then I thought. Well maybe I could and I told a neighbor and she knew a koto teacher and she introduced me and I started taking lessons and I was hooked right away. I love the sound, so sometimes you play just by finger picking, but usually you use it. these little ones are called sume or I guess nails or claws actually so there's three of them and you just um and right next to these tatami rooms there's a

traditional

feature of a Japanese house called en gawa maybe you've seen this if you you've seen.

Any Japanese movie or anime is like a space between the inside of the house and the outside. These doors are huge but they are very well made so even after all this time they still slide very easily and you can open them when the weather is nice. and you feel like you're outside in the garden but actually you're still inside, so this room was used by the family, I think, as a kind of office, and they wanted it to be a bit western, I guess that's why they had these lights . but it was very dark and there were wood panels that were peeling off the walls and the floor was very sunken, so for me it was the most depressing room in the house and I guess that's why I went overboard with the color scheme in these photos one of the kids in the family liked a camera and I think he was actually a very good photographer like this is a shot, a self-portrait, it's him in the photo taking a photo of this photo and I guess this is Tokyo, but This seems so 50s, 60s, 60s.

He got the camera in the 60s, so these were stuck in a notebook that I found in an upstairs drawer in one of the dressers, so I had them, they were about size . Prince, I blew them up, that's why they're not completely focused, but they're like a part of the family's life in the '60s. There's an interesting backstory to this one because, um, this is that gang scam that It's at the entrance. to the house and this is that room and the family had the first television in sasama, as you can see there, and the family allowed the children of the village and other people who lived in the village to come and watch television, but they did not He allowed them to go. inside the room, that's why they are all sitting there at the entrance of the room.

This photo is important to Shelley because she personally knew one of the children who she was not allowed into the house, something she found really rewarding. This project is that sometimes people come and want to see the property and then they tell me that I came here when I was a child but I wasn't allowed in or that a woman came to the cafe

recently

and she said that she traveled from a place that is now a hour drive, so I can only imagine 50 or 60 years ago how long it would have taken him to get here and then, even though he is related, he was not allowed to enter. house because she wasn't a high ranking person so she just came up to the gang scam and she told me that and I was very excited and I said, "Okay, you're going into the house today and I gave her a

tour

and she was almost crying because she was so happy to finally see it and that I was restoring it and she said it looks so beautiful and that's really meaningful to me, to make people remember her story and be proud of her Shelley.

He takes us on a

tour

of the estate and we start with a building that was originally a guest house used for tea ceremonies and entertainment, paying homage to its origins Shelley converted the building into a cafe and welcomes locals and tourists on Saturdays. The entire building has been

restored

to its original beauty and houses a number of antiques, including traditional luxury bathrooms that resemble fine porcelain and are displayed at the back of the cafe. They seem to really like Shelley and thanks to her. Appearances on Japanese television. She is famous in the area. Well, Japan seems like a very welcoming country if you come here as a tourist.

I mean the people you interact with are very polite and very helpful, but I think most people who have spent some time in Japan. I know that's pretty superficial and to really dig in and become part of Japanese society is a lot harder to do and I don't know if that's harder or easier in the field, but I would say it's more important in the field. Be a part of the community because there are very few people who live in villages, as if they lived in a big family. Some of the other buildings on the property are still being renovated, but Nami and I stayed in the cabin that Shelly runs as an Airbnb.

I won't be making a profit from her business, but if you want to visit a local town next time you're in Japan, she'll appreciate it if you subscribe to learn more about Japan, see you next time.