Samurai Heritage
Yubikan, in Ōsaki City, Miyagi Prefecture, is a historic samurai villa built in 1677 by the Date clan’s Iwadeyama branch. Once a retirement home and later a han school, it’s one of Japan’s oldest surviving educational buildings. The villa features classic shoin-zukuri architecture and a scenic 18th-century garden that uses Iwadeyama Castle ruins as borrowed scenery. Designated a National Historic Site, Yubikan was restored after the 2011 earthquake and reopened in 2016.
