Shayokan

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

Researched and written by Hinato

Dazai OsamuShayokanKanagiImportant Cultural Propertyliterature

Aomori · Goshogawara

40.9206°N, 140.5519°E

Shayokan has outlasted the version of Aomori it was originally built for, and it shows.

Dazai Osamu wrote No Longer Human and The Setting Sun, drowned himself in 1948 at thirty-eight, and is read by essentially every Japanese teenager. He was born in 1909 in this house, in the small town of Kanagi on the Tsugaru plain, the tenth child of a landlord and moneylender rich enough to build something extraordinary: nineteen rooms across two floors, brick-walled, with a Western-style reception room, a huge interior staircase and a walled garden, put up in 1907 on the profits of tenant farming.

His discomfort with that inheritance runs through everything he wrote. The house was a ryokan for decades after the family lost it, was bought by the town in 1996, opened as a museum, and designated an Important Cultural Property in 2004. Walking through it makes the class distance in his work suddenly physical — this is what he was ashamed of.

Visiting essentials

How long to allow

60–90 minutes

Best season

Year-round | Winter to combine with the stove train

Hours

9:00 AM – 5:00 PM | Last entry 4:30 PM

Closed: Closed 29 December

Admission

¥600 general | ¥400 high school and university students | ¥250 elementary and junior high school students | Combination ticket with the Tsugaru Shamisen Hall available

Access route

Directions

Kanagi-machi, Goshogawara. About a short walk from Kanagi Station on the Tsugaru Railway, which is the line that runs the winter stove train. Closed 29 December. Admission ¥600 general, ¥400 high school and university students and ¥250 elementary and junior high school students, with a combination ticket available for the Tsugaru Shamisen Hall. Phone.

Historical notes & tips

**Read something first.** Twenty minutes of No Longer Human or Tsugaru before you arrive turns a large old house into the specific thing he could not get away from. Both are widely available in English. **Look at the scale, not the objects.** Nineteen rooms, brick construction and a Western reception room in a Tsugaru farming village in 1907 is the exhibit. The family's wealth relative to the tenants around them is the biography. **Combine with the stove train.** Kanagi is on the Tsugaru Railway and the museum is five minutes from the station, which makes this the natural stop on a winter stove train run. **The Shamisen Hall is next door.** Tsugaru-jamisen, the hard percussive style of shamisen playing, comes from this area, and the combination ticket covers live demonstrations. **Open essentially every day.** Only 29 December closes it, which is unusual for a museum of this kind.

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