Sawara Historic District

Sawara lies on the Ono River where it joins the Tone, in Katori in Chiba Prefecture. The merchant houses along the river and the Katori road were built on the trade that the Tone carried, and about seven hectares of the quarter were selected as an Important Preservation District in December 1996, the first in the Kanto region.

Sawara stood at the point where goods coming down the Tone were transferred for the run to Edo, and the merchants who handled that traffic built the houses that still line the water. Some are Japanese town houses with tiled roofs and plastered storehouses behind them; others, put up later, are Western in style, so that the street shows the change from one period to the next.

The quarter is often called the little Edo of the Hokuso district. What distinguishes it from other preserved streets is that many of the businesses in it are still run by the families who have always run them, and the houses are lived in.

Ino Tadataka, whose survey of the coast of Japan on foot produced the first accurate map of the country, kept a brewing and merchant business at Sawara until he took up surveying at the age of fifty. His house stands by the river and is open, and a museum across the bridge holds his instruments, his notebooks and his maps, which are National Treasures.

The Sawara Grand Festival has been held for about three hundred years, in summer at one shrine and in autumn at another. Tall floats carrying figures are pulled through the streets to festival music. Several of the floats are kept and shown at a hall in the town when the festival is not running.