Takeuchi Gozaemon Former Honjin

This building was once Kinomoto-juku's honjin, an inn reserved for traveling daimyo lords and high-ranking officials on the old highway. The Takeuchi family ran it before pivoting to medicine in the mid-nineteenth century. Takeuchi Gozaemon, the twenty-second family head, earned his pharmacist's license during the Meiji era, and the family pharmacy continues today in a nearby building. Out front, a stone marker reproduction shows the old crossroads pointing toward Kyoto on one side and Edo on the other. An inuzakura tree in the yard is said to have grown from the whip that warlord Toyotomi Hideyoshi planted as a grave marker for his horse.