Okumura Family Residence Corridor

The Watari-rō of the Okumura Family Residence

Behind a line of tile-roofed townhouses near the eastern edge of Inuyama's old castle town, a low wooden passage runs north to south, linking the southeast corner of a merchant's main house to a two-story storehouse at the back of the lot. This is the watari-rō, a covered connecting corridor built during the Meiji era (1868 to 1911) as part of the Okumura family compound. The Okumura were dealers in kimono fabric and textiles, among the more prosperous trading families of Inuyama, and over generations their property grew into a cluster of dwellings, gates, and storehouses gathered behind a single street frontage. The corridor is only one element of that ensemble. For its size, though, it carries a remarkable amount of work: roughly 66 square meters of single-story timber under a tiled gable roof.

The main house at the front was rebuilt soon after the great Inuyama fire of 1842, which tore through the town and forced much of it to start over. The watari-rō belongs to a later phase, added as the household expanded and remodeled through the Meiji years, a process that included a major renovation recorded in 1899.

Why It Is Registered

The corridor is a Registered Tangible Cultural Property (tōroku yūkei bunkazai), a category Japan introduced in 1996 for buildings that deserve protection but sit a step below the stricter "designated" classes such as Important Cultural Property. Registration works through a lighter touch: owners notify the authorities before making significant changes rather than applying for permission, an approach suited to buildings that remain in daily use. In August 1999, nine structures of the Okumura compound were registered together, the watari-rō among them, recognized under the criterion of serving as a standard of design.

Its value rests less on any single feature than on what it gives to the whole. The corridor stitches the living quarters to the working and storage parts of the property, and through its placement, proportions, and detailing it helps the compound read as one coherent merchant household rather than a scatter of separate buildings. Seen alongside the other registered structures, it shows how a well-off Inuyama trading family organized the deep space behind its shopfront.

What to Notice

For a service corridor, the watari-rō does a surprising number of jobs at once. It was built to double as a well-house (idoyakata), sheltering a well within its length. Its west face is left open, without walls, so the passage breathes toward the garden side. Along the southern half of the east side it once held a servant's room and a toilet, and the lower portion of that east wall is faced with brick, a material that worked its way into ordinary Japanese building during the Meiji decades and marks the corridor as a product of its time. Where it reaches the rice storehouse, it merges with the north eaves of the neighboring tool storehouse, so three elements interlock at the rear of the lot.

That concentration of functions in one slender building is the point worth pausing over. A single passage leads you between rooms, draws water, houses staff, and binds the storehouses into the plan of the residence. One caveat for visitors: since the property became a restaurant, the former servant's room, bath, and toilet area has been remodeled, so this stretch no longer reads exactly as it did when the family lived here.

The Compound and the Town Around It

The watari-rō makes the most sense viewed within the full Okumura compound, nine registered buildings standing together: the main house, the roofed gate (munemon), the rice storehouse, a vault storehouse and a tool storehouse, a detached wing, a barn, the corridor itself, and a tall plastered boundary wall braced with buttress-like posts. Several of these, including the main house and storehouses, can be seen from the street without going inside.

The garden keeps a few small surprises. A well called Ginmeisui draws on groundwater connected to the Kiso River; by local tradition the warlord Oda Nobunaga is said to have stopped here for a drink. Elsewhere in the grounds sit a suikinkutsu, a buried chamber that gives off a faint bell-like note as water drips into it, a stone lantern of the form linked to hidden Christians, and a stone water basin carved with stacked turtles as an emblem of long life.

Inuyama itself rewards an unhurried visit. The compound lies a few minutes' walk east of Meitetsu Inuyama Station, close to the eastern boundary of the former castle town. A short distance away, above the Kiso River, rises the keep of Inuyama Castle, one of the oldest surviving wooden donjons in Japan.

A practical point: the Okumura property no longer operates as a free historic-house exhibit. It now runs as a French restaurant, with a separate teppanyaki room in the former detached wing, so the interior, the corridor included, is open chiefly to dining guests. Booking ahead is advised; lunch is reservation-preferred and dinner reservation-only, and the kitchen observes its own closing days. Travelers who only want a look can still take in the street facade and the registered buildings visible from outside.