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Makabe Historic District

Locally knownKnown to people who live here. Not in the international guidebooks.

Researched and written by Hinato

Makabepreservation districtmisegurahina dollsSakuragawa

Ibaraki · Sakuragawa

36.2768°N, 140.1006°E

Makabe Historic District is easy to reduce to a photo stop, but the history behind it is what makes the stop worth making.

Makabe began as the castle town of the medieval Makabe clan and grew into a market town under the Tokugawa, and the street plan has not changed since. What fills it is misegura — heavy plastered merchant shop-warehouses from the late Edo and Meiji periods — along with earthen storehouses, gates and a scattering of Taisho and early Showa Western-influenced buildings. More than three hundred survive and 104 are nationally registered cultural properties. It was designated an Important Preservation District in 2010, the eighty-seventh in the country and the first in Ibaraki.

It is a lived-in town rather than a museum, which is why the annual event works. Every February a hundred-odd households put their inherited hina dolls in the front rooms and open the shutters so passers-by can look in. It started in 2003 with twenty-one families and now draws seventy thousand people over four weeks. Outside that month, Makabe is almost entirely quiet.

Before you go

Opening hours

Streets open at all times | Individual houses and museums keep their own hours

Closed: District open year-round | Hina doll displays are limited to the February festival period

Admission

Free to walk | Individual houses and museums priced separately

Best time to visit

Early February–early March for the hina doll festival | Any other month for an empty historic town

Time to allow

1.5–2.5 hours

How to reach it

Getting there in detail

Makabe, Makabe-cho, Sakuragawa. Car effectively required outside the doll festival — from Sakuragawa-Chikusei IC, by bus from JR Iwase Station, or via Tsukuba Station and a change to the Sakuragawa city bus. Free to walk the streets; individual houses and museums are priced separately. Makabe Hinamatsuri runs roughly 4 February – 3 March, with additional buses from Tsukuba Station during the festival only.

Historical notes & tips

**February is when the interiors open.** For four weeks the hina dolls are displayed in front rooms with the shutters back, which is the only time you see inside these buildings. Special buses run from Tsukuba only during the festival, which is also the only time getting here without a car is straightforward. **Outside February you get the buildings and no one else.** That is a real trade. The misegura frontages, the plaster detailing and the storehouse gables are the substance of the place and they are there year-round, in a town with almost no visitors. **Look at the plasterwork.** The thick lime-plaster fronts with their heavy eaves and fire-resistant shutters are the local building answer to a town of wooden houses. Once you notice the shutter tracks and the door pivots, the street reads differently. **Combine with Amabiki Kannon.** The hillside temple with its hydrangeas and free-roaming peacocks is fifteen minutes away in the same city, and the two make a natural half-day.

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