Horiuchi District, Hagi

The Horiuchi District of Hagi is a samurai quarter occupying the third enclosure of the former Hagi Castle. The history of the castle town goes back to 1608 (Keicho 13), when Mori Terumoto built his castle on Mt. Shizuki and divided up the town. The preservation district covers almost all of Horiuchi, about 55 hectares. In 1976 it was selected as an Important Preservation District for Groups of Traditional Buildings, together with the neighboring Hiyako District. Walking the streets of Horiuchi means tracing the framework of the castle town itself.

The area once held the domain's government offices (the domain storehouse office, the timber office, the office handling business for the domain's districts, the kitchen office and the foot soldiers' office) and the large residences of senior retainers, including relatives of the Mori clan. In other words, Horiuchi was closer to the center of the domain's government than to an ordinary residential area. The land division of a samurai quarter in an early modern castle town remains well preserved. That government offices and senior retainers' residences shared one district defines Horiuchi's character.

What is worth checking on foot is less each individual building than the way the earthen-walled streets are laid out. Summer orange trees rising above the earthen walls create the historic atmosphere of the district. Over ten samurai residences survive here, beginning with the lookout turret of the Masuda family, hereditary chief retainers. The turret offers a clue to how large the residences of the domain's senior retainers were.

The neighboring Hiyako District lies south of the outer moat that surrounds the third enclosure. While many senior retainers lived in Horiuchi, in Hiyako a large number of samurai set up residences as land clearing advanced. Along the Hashimoto River the Edo-period land division remains, and main houses, gate-houses (nagayamon), long houses and storehouses survive along with the long earthen walls that form the kaimagari (right-angle bends). If you look at the large residence plots in Horiuchi and then walk the kaimagari in Hiyako, the difference in how the two districts came about becomes visible.

The history of preservation also helps in reading the place. Hagi enacted an ordinance on the preservation of historic scenery in 1972, and in 1976 it enacted a preservation-district ordinance and received national selection. In 2004 it set out the duties of the city and its citizens in the Hagi Machijuu Museum Ordinance, and in 2015 the Horiuchi district was included in the component site "Hagi Castle Town (upper-class samurai quarter)" of the World Heritage property Sites of Japan's Meiji Industrial Revolution. Residents' clean-up activities, guided tours with old maps in Horiuchi, and the Natsumikan Festival in Hiyako continue today.