The Ninja Mansion Experiment
When Alzheimer’s stole her husband’s memory and constricted her life, Michiko Katsuse opened her doors — and flourished.
Words by Scott Mowbray
Photographs by Cait Oppermann
THE HAMLET OF Shimosagiri is seven miles east of Toyota City, headquarters of the global car company, which is 20 miles from Nagoya, a metropolitan area of nine million people. Hop on the Shinkansen bullet train at the base of a 51-story tower in Nagoya and you’ll be in Tokyo, the world’s most populous city, in less than two hours.
Yet wee Shimosagiri — a half dozen houses nestled among thick-forested hills — feels 150 years removed from the clockwork action of urban Japan and its railway lifelines. Yards are fenced to discourage the wild boar that still live among the beech, tall cedar, and bamboo in the hills. The lovely Tsushima shrine, up a short woodsy path, is communally maintained. Visitors are rare.
Or they were rare until the improbably named Ninja Mansion opened in Shimosagiri as an Airbnb in late 2015. There, in a house built in the mid-1800s by a forester and sawmill operator, guests sleep on traditional futons with buckwheat pillows in bedrooms that are separated by sliding screens. The grassy aroma of tatami mats perfumes the air. Summer nights are country calm, disturbed only by frog song. When dawn arrives, birds riot outside in unfamiliar tweets and squawks. Soon it’s time to fold and store the futons and slide open the screens so that the house can open like a puzzle to its daytime configuration. The lucky visitor puts on water to boil for green tea and then faces the day’s critical decision: to linger with a book, then take a trip to the local sake store (where the owner will decant a junmai sake into bottles from a chilled urn)? Or venture into the bustle of the markets and restaurants and museums of the big cities?
The Ninja Mansion had been one family’s summer retreat for decades. Yuki Katsuse, now 80, was a law professor in Nagoya when he spotted the dilapidated but imposing house on a country drive 40 years ago. The main building was tall and long with a pitched tiled roof, white-painted mud walls, and lots of dark woodwork. Yuki suspected that a warehouse on the property might be full of antiques — his passion. He and his wife, Michiko, now 74, learned that the owners, descendants of the original builder, were ready to sell. They purchased the home for the equivalent of $30,000. Thus began a lengthy DIY improvement project.
“It was almost like a summer project every year — which part of the house were we going to fix next?” remembers Michiko. “We didn’t have a lot of money, so we did it ourselves. It was a craft project, and that memory is important. When the house was livable, my husband invited a lot of guests over in the summer. One time we had 30 kids who came and stayed for two days.”
The plan was to retire in Shimosagiri and travel when the urge arose. Retirement came; the plan was on track. But seven years ago, Alzheimer’s insinuated its way into the couple’s life, gradually robbing Yuki of his memory and Michiko of the world beyond her home. Though Yuki remained — and remains — funny, vigorous, cheerful, and engaging, the disease cinched tightly about his wife’s day-to-day life. Today he might not recognize his two sons when they visit.
“With caring for my husband,” she says, “I had to stay in one place, I stopped going out, I stopped shopping. It put a lot of pressure on me, a lot of unhappiness. I was depressed because I couldn’t do anything except take care of him.” There were financial pressures too. Michiko needed help.
In 2015, her older son, Hiro Katsuse, a Tokyo businessman, persuaded her to list the home on Airbnb. Hiro is 52 but still mop-topped and restless and brimming with business ideas. Since coming to the US to get an MBA at Mississippi State, he has worked in telecom, health care, and tourism on three continents. The nominal reason for his Airbnb push was financial: With more money coming in, his father would be able to go to a day-care facility. But the deeper motive was his mother’s happiness. Hiro was eager to test his theory about the benefits of postretirement work that the sharing economy could offer to long-lived populations; he has graphs in his phone about Japan’s famously graying demographics. The Ninja Mansion would be, in part, an experiment.
But Mom wasn’t having it.
“My first reaction was no!” Michiko says in Japanese, Hiro translating. “I don’t speak English. I don’t like strangers. I don’t want someone to come to my house. I totally refused. But my son came and said, ‘Just trust me. I’ll help. If something happens, we’ll quit immediately.’”
Eventually she agreed, though nervous. The first job was to ready the house for guests. Imagine the psychological disruption: “We had been married in this house,” Michiko says, “and kept it for 40 years. We had lots and lots of stuff, both memories and junk.”
The couple would move across the courtyard to what had been, when the house was originally built, the servants’ quarters. Many of the possessions would be sold off or given away by Hiro. The main building was restored to an elegant, spare space with lacquered dining tables, bent-bamboo chairs in the breakfast room, and paper screens printed with mountain scenes. A serene tearoom looks out on a tiny garden. A long, shallow porch faces the courtyard with a view of the hills.
It would be billed as a historic Japanese home with traditional rules and amenities: shoes off everywhere in the house, a dining table set into the floor, and a large bathing room with ladles for ablutions. There were modern conveniences too, of course, including Wi-Fi, remote controls for the paper-lantern lights, and a pair of those complicated toilets that have more electronic controls than a late-model Toyota. Guests could use the tight but well-equipped kitchen with a restaurant-style stove and oven. If they liked, they could also try the indoor charcoal grill that is set into a table in a dedicated room, where the smoke from years of searing seafood and fatty wagyu beef has given the ceiling a black patina.
There were a few quirks to remind guests that this is still a family home: For reasons that escape Hiro’s understanding, his father once installed a glittery gold tub in the bathing room. It’s fabulous, but surreal. And Michiko and Yuki remain on the property. As to the name, Hiro admits that it was a marketer’s amalgam of folklore and clickbait. There is no evidence that the legendary assassins ever operated out of the sawmill owner’s home.
At first, opening her home to strangers strained Michiko’s introverted nature. “My husband was the more open person; I was the one behind his shadow, trying to protect,” she says. “He had always welcomed a lot of guests here. So I had accepted people into my house. But they weren’t foreigners or strangers.”
Privacy and the sanctity of the home space are particularly precious to the Japanese, despite the communal aspects of the famous bathhouses and the jocular intimacy of the tiny bars and restaurants that dot every neighborhood. But to sit with Michiko over a glass of fresh yuzu juice and soda is to recognize her practicality and how she savors the new balance that sharing her home has brought to her life.
For one thing, she was surprised to find that she enjoyed the encounters with guests, Japanese and foreign. “I suppose my husband had prepared me for welcoming guests. Now I welcome strangers, and it’s quite natural to me. I’m more open. This might be my hidden talent. It didn’t come out until the opportunity came.”
The work and the income had a secondary effect, predicted by her son. Her husband can go to a facility for daily care while she prepares the home for the next guests. “Now I have much more balance in my life. When my husband can go to day care, I can be kind when he returns. Before, I was so stressed, and I could even be mean.”
Michiko’s warmth and grace set the tone for guests, who quickly cotton to the no-shoes rule, the futon rituals, the buckwheat pillows. Her home is less than a half hour from the Toyota City train station by rental car. (Renting is easy in Japan, and English navigation systems are available. But specify that you want an automatic, as you’ll need to focus on the nuances of driving on the left-hand side of the road and keep money ready for the tolls.) With the listing up and running, Hiro was not finished with the property. There was a small, elegant outbuilding near the home, and he cut a deal with a friend visiting from Athens, Georgia, to license the name of a Southern coffee operation called Jittery Joe’s. Young baristas make pour-overs and cortados with the exquisite precision that marks the Japanese approach to almost everything culinary. Their on-site roastery, Work Bench Coffee Roasters, is now listed on Google Maps. It’s an anomaly in the rural area, drawing visitors from Toyota City and beyond who come for an $8 java and a sit in the Ninja Mansion courtyard.
Overnight guests are not the only customers. The property, which can feel like a film set, is frequently rented for traditional weddings. When there are no weekend guests, groups of cosplay enthusiasts often book to dress up as princesses and fabulous creatures and pose against the historic backdrops. None of this seems to faze Michiko. She is nourished by the activity and the work. She makes sure that guests are comfortable while Yuki patrols the courtyard, offering friendly greetings, playing “Amazing Grace” and other songs on the harmonica.
“I feel it is really opening my eyes to the world,” Michiko says. “I never expected that my life would flourish like this. People actually come to me, saying it’s a wonderful house, appreciating me. Being appreciated, just by offering this traditional Japanese house — it’s such a joy.”
Experiment successful, in other words. Hiro notes that a side benefit of the sharing economy is the shared work. Once-obligatory telephone calls from a Tokyo son to check in on his country mom have been replaced by longer discussions about the evolution of the business. “My mom says communication among the family improved tremendously,” Hiro says. “Guests happy, mother happy, I’m happy, everyone is happy!”
Michiko says she thinks she can manage the home until she’s at least 80: “It’s saving my life now.”
Meanwhile, the little hamlet of Shimosagiri keeps its collective eyes on the comings and goings at the house on the hill. It’s not unsupportive, Hiro says, just very curious. The family from Nagoya has been in this house for only 40 years, after all. “They don’t really regard us as local,” he says. “The people from outside are up to something different!”
The Ninja Checklist
Useful
Rent a portable Wi-Fi for a couple of dollars per day. (If you’re driving, you’ll want Google Maps.) The gurunavi.com Web site is invaluable for English speakers trying to decipher the Japanese restaurant scene.
Teatime
Matcha tea is a local specialty, and the Kokaen store in Toyota City is a gem, with the tea stone-ground to powder in a tiny, old-fashioned factory out back. The charming owner, Yoshitaka Noba, is a national matcha prizewinner and will demonstrate making both the hot and the sublime iced versions, depending on the season. You’ll need a translator.
Nearby
The Toyota Kaikan Museum and plant tour in Toyota City will appeal to anyone interested in robotics and advanced car tech. If you really dig car history and design, try the Toyota Automobile Museum, which features models dating to the early days.
Worth it
Arts-and-crafts demonstration villages can be corny, but Sanshu Asuke Yashiki, only a few miles from the Ninja Mansion, is tasteful and nestled amid beautiful hills on a river. See woodworking, knife forging, and more, with opportunities for hands-on experiences.
Food
For rich wagyu beef — many cuts, grilled yourself — with icy beer or cold sake, try Hanabi in downtown Toyota City, which (unlike many of the restaurants) has an English menu. For the classic dish of glazed eel on rice, try the little Unagiya restaurant. It’s their specialty.
In Nagoya, seek out the local chopped eel variation called hitsumabushi, which has dedicated restaurants and a multistep eating protocol best googled before going. Fried chicken wings called tebasaki are another local specialty. Japan has some of the world’s finest food halls — if you’re passing through Nagoya’s main Japan Rail station, the one in the basement of the 50-story-plus JR Central Towers is mind-boggling in its variety. For the train ride, buy a bento box or, if you’re brave, a bowl of miso beef intestines (delicious).
Souvenirs
Don’t miss the gorgeous, stylish bookstore and clothing boutique Kura No Naka Gallery, where you can also have treats like grapefruit pudding with caramel sauce and matcha-tea pound cake.
About the author: Scott Mowbray is a National Magazine Award- and James Beard Award-winning writer and editor. He is a former editor of magazines for Time Inc. who now spends his time mostly traveling and cooking. He lives in Boulder, Colorado, with his wife, Kate Meyers, the editor of Colorado Homes magazine.
