Futaba-kan, the house of Kawakami Sadayakko (文化のみち二葉館) 文化のみち二葉館
The house of Japan's first actress, taken apart, moved and put back up: 200 yen.
Kawakami Sadayakko is considered the first professional actress of modern Japan, in a theatre where until then the female roles had been played by men. From 1920 she lived in this house for some five years with Fukuzawa Momosuke, the businessman who built the hydroelectric power stations on the Kiso River and who was known as ‘the king of electricity’. The house mixes a Japanese floor plan with Western details; it is built of wood, with parts in reinforced concrete, two storeys, almost seven hundred square metres. It stood in another part of the same neighbourhood, where it was called ‘the Futaba palace’: it was dismantled piece by piece, reassembled here and opened to the public on 8 February 2005. The name comes from that nickname and also from the idea that culture sprouts like a pair of new little leaves, which in Japanese are called futaba.
Aichi
Sakaemachi, Sakae, Chikusa, Takaoka
