Seizanso

Tokugawa Mitsukuni is one of the most recognisable figures in Japan — as Mito Komon, the disguised elderly lord of a long-running television series, he is known to essentially everyone over forty. The historical man retired from the lordship of Mito in 1691 and spent his last nine years here, in a deliberately plain thatched house in the hills of Hitachiota, supervising the compilation of the Dai Nihonshi, the vast history of Japan that his domain worked on for two and a half centuries.

The house is small and unshowy on purpose. What surrounds it is not: a hillside garden of moss, stream and old trees that is at its best in late autumn. It is still owned by the Tokugawa family, which is part of why the admission is high for what is a modest building — and also why it has not been turned into anything else.