Okura Park Thatched Gate (Former Okura Villa Main Gate)

What the Ōkura Park Thatched Gate is

The Ōkura Park Thatched Gate (大倉公園茅葺門, also written Okura Park Thatched Gate) is a thatched Taishō-period gatehouse at the entrance to Ōkura Park in Momoyama-chō, Ōbu, Aichi Prefecture, and it was placed on Japan's national register of tangible cultural properties on 4 August 2015. The Agency for Cultural Affairs records a single timber-framed structure of one storey, thatched, with a building area of 40 square metres.

The type is a Nagayamon, a gate whose passageway shares one roof with rooms built in on either side. Its Kirizuma-zukuri gable does not run level across the front. The section over the doorway is stepped up, so the ridge lifts in the middle and drops away to left and right, and the outline reads clearly when you stand square to it. Ōbu City gives the size as roughly 5 metres high, 13 metres wide and 4 metres deep.

Two hinged board leaves close the passage. Beside them on the east side, which is to your right as you face the gate, sits a small wicket door sized for one person stooping through, so the household could come and go without swinging the main leaves open. The walls of the flanking rooms are sheathed in cedar bark below and finished in white plaster above.

The sources do not agree on the year of building. The Agency for Cultural Affairs gives about 1922. Ōbu City states that Ōkura Kazuchika had the gate put up in 1921.

Why the gate was registered

The Ōkura Park Thatched Gate qualified under a single criterion used for registration: that a structure contributes to the historic landscape of the country. Its registration number is 23-0427, granted in the eighty-first round of listings. The Ōkura Park Rest House, the former detached guest wing of the same villa and a short walk uphill, was registered on the same day, and together the two became the first nationally registered structures in Ōbu.

The villa behind the gate belonged to Ōkura Kazuchika, first president of Nippon Toki, the porcelain maker known today as Noritake, and a founder of related ceramics ventures including the firm that became TOTO. What visitors see is the entrance he chose for his country retreat.

The official description singles out the way this gate builds an entrance front for an industrialist's villa in an unusual idiom, plain in material yet formal in bearing. It is neither the heavy timber gate of a samurai residence nor the bracketed gate of a temple. Thatch, a material of farmhouses, has been used here to signal rank, and that combination is what the listing recognises.

What was lost in the 1979 relocation

The Ōkura Park Thatched Gate does not stand where it was built. It originally faced the Yokone-Ōbu prefectural road, and it was moved to the present spot in 1979 when the grounds were laid out as a public park.

The move changed the building considerably. According to the Agency for Cultural Affairs, long wings once ran left and right along the road frontage, and the gate formed the centre of a broad entrance façade. Ōbu City describes these as thatched single-storey annexes of about 20 square metres each, said to have housed servants. They were demolished when the gate was relocated, and only the core was carried across.

So the structure in the park today is the middle of something that used to be much wider. The abrupt way the roof stops at each end is the clearest evidence: the building continued past that point. Mentally extending those eaves along a road gives a fair sense of how large the Ōkura estate once presented itself.

Thatchers from Tōno keep the roof alive

A thatched roof holds its shape only if it is renewed on a cycle, and the roof of the Ōkura Park Thatched Gate has been worked on repeatedly.

Ōbu City records that in 2009 and again in 2014, thatchers from the Tōno Vocational Training Association's thatching course helped replace roofing material. Tōno, in Iwate Prefecture, is Ōbu's friendship city. In fiscal 2019 the roof was stripped and laid again in full for the first time since 2009, this time with craftsmen from the Tōno Thatch Preservation Association, funded in part through an Aichi Prefecture grant programme for municipal projects.

Fresh thatch carries a yellow cast and turns towards grey as the years pass, so the colour of the roof depends on when you happen to arrive. Standing close and looking up along the eaves, you can see the cut ends of the reeds stacked in layers, which is the part of the craft that photographs rarely convey.

Visiting the gate

The Ōkura Park Thatched Gate marks the park entrance, so anyone walking in passes beneath it. There is no admission charge and no booking is needed to look at it.

Ōbu City lists park opening hours as 8:00 to 17:00 in January through April and September through December, and 8:00 to 18:30 from May through August. The gate stands outdoors, so within those hours you can study it from the approach and from the park side. Walking through and turning back is worth the few extra steps, since the inner face shows parts of the timber frame and the change in roof thickness that the front hides.

Ōbu Station on the JR Tōkaidō Line is the starting point, about a fifteen-minute walk according to Aichi Prefecture's official tourism site. Pass between the Ōbu Museum of History and Folklore and the neighbouring community centre, then climb the ramp heading west; the thatched roof appears at the top of the slope. The park has no car park, so public transport is the practical choice.

Ōbu City's guidance carries no notice prohibiting personal photography. If you intend to set up a tripod or shoot commercially, check first with the city's Water and Green Parks Division on 0562-45-6236.

On a Saturday and Sunday in late April the park hosts an azalea festival, and the ground around the gate fills with visitors. A weekday morning suits anyone who wants to look at the structure itself without a crowd moving through the passage.