Kojima Family Residence Zashiki (Guest Wing)

The wing built for receiving guests

Kojima Family Residence Zashiki (Guest Wing) (小島家住宅座敷, Kojima-ke Jūtaku Zashiki) is a single-story reception building of 1847 in the castle town of Inuyama, Aichi Prefecture, entered on Japan's register of Registered Tangible Cultural Property in 2005.

It is timber-framed and tiled, with a floor area of 163 square meters, and joins the main house at its southwest corner. The Kirizuma-zukuri gable roof of Sangawara-buki pantiles is surrounded on all four sides by lean-to roofs. A shikidai, the formal stepped entrance platform reserved for guests of standing, sits on the east front toward its northern end. Inside are a 15-mat hall, a room for the family altar, and rooms in the shoin manner.

The Kojima family have brewed in Inuyama since 1597 by their own account, their speciality being nindōshu, a medicinal liquor made with honeysuckle. That a brewing household kept a reception wing on this scale, separate from the house where trade was carried on, says something about its standing. Kojima Family Residence Zashiki was built not to sell from but to seat people in.

Registered in 2005, dated with an argument still open

The wing was registered under the criterion of contribution to the historic landscape, with the number 23-0174. Seven Kojima buildings entered the register together on 9 February 2005: the main house, this guest wing, the south storehouse, the north sake brewery and north storehouse, the west sake brewery and preparation room, the reception room and the roofed wall.

The Agency for Cultural Affairs dates the wing to 1847. That date is disputed. At a 2019 meeting of the Society of Architectural Historians of Japan, a paper drawing on the owner's own survey argued that the wing had been raised elsewhere in the Tenshō era, between 1573 and 1592, and moved to the present site in 1597. The evidence offered was the handle fittings of the sliding screens, the carved Ranma transoms between rooms, and tool marks surviving on the beams of the roof structure.

The discussion that followed pushed back. On stylistic grounds the design looked later than that, and a dated tablet of 1847 had been found fixed to the roof frame. The presenter replied that the tablet was a prayer plaque, that a good deal of Muromachi-period timber remained in the frame, and that nothing could be settled without dismantling the building.

So the position today is this: the registered date is 1847, and the possibility of older timber inside the frame is an open question among specialists. Looking at Kojima Family Residence Zashiki with that unresolved argument in mind makes the building more interesting, not less.

From the shikidai to the Zangetsu room

The shikidai on the east front is a low boarded platform, the entrance a formal visitor used. Everyday coming and going happened on the main house side, and this door stayed shut for occasions. Two entrances in one household is itself a statement about the rank of the guests expected.

Behind the shikidai lies an 8-mat inner corridor, and off it to the south opens the 15-mat hall. Its south wall carries the full set of formal fittings: an alcove, staggered shelves and a built-in writing bay. To the north are a 7.5-mat anteroom and, west of that, a 10-mat room for the family altar.

West of the hall is the 12-mat Zangetsu room, modelled on the Zangetsu-tei of the Senke tea houses in Kyoto. Tea-room design has been folded into a domestic reception room here, and this is the space for which Kojima Family Residence Zashiki is best known; spring openings in the past have been built around it.

The timber repays attention. The posts are shihō-masa, cut so that straight grain runs on all four faces, a yield only a very large tree gives up. Ceiling boards are jindai-sugi, cryptomeria recovered after long burial. Carved transoms and the detailing of the alcove fittings are worked to the same level. Look up at the ceiling, then sideways along a post, and the sums spent on this wing become legible.

One more thing has been proposed: that beneath the present pantiles the roof was once a low-pitched Hiwadabuki covering of cypress bark. If so, the silhouette from outside would have been noticeably different.

Visiting

The wing is privately owned and is not normally open. Standing behind the main house, it gives little away from the street; only part of its roof is visible from outside.

Since 2025 part of the compound has been in use as lodging. The operator's website calls the Kojima property the Neriya wing and describes guest rooms, a Japanese restaurant, a tea room and a garden within it, so guests and diners with reservations do spend time in this part of the site. In-house tours are advertised but listed as still in preparation, which makes a direct enquiry to the operator worthwhile before a visit.

Kojima Jozo continues to sell nindōshu on the premises. Inuyama Tourist Association gives the hours as 10:00 a.m. to 4:00 p.m. with a break from noon to 1:00 p.m., closed Sundays and Wednesday mornings. Buying a bottle is one thing; seeing the guest wing is another.

The nearest station is Meitetsu Inuyama, about 10 minutes on foot from the west exit, and roughly 30 minutes from Meitetsu Nagoya Station.

Photography inside the gate needs the agreement of the owner or the operator, since the ground is private and doubles as working space for a shop and an inn. From the street there is no restriction.