Koiwai Farm Facilities

Twenty-One Buildings Still Doing Their Job

Koiwai Farm Facilities (小岩井農場施設, Koiwai Nōjō Shisetsu) is a group of twenty-one farm buildings at Marutanchi, Shizukuishi Town, Iwate District, Iwate Prefecture, erected between 1903 and the mid-1930s and designated an Important Cultural Property on 23 February 2017.

Designation usually means a building stops working. Here it did not. Cows still live in the cattle barns. Grain still moves through the storehouses. The farm office still holds staff. Of the twenty-one listed structures, most remain in service, which is close to unheard of among Japan's designated industrial and agricultural heritage.

Three Men and a Volcanic Wasteland

The farm was founded in 1891 by Inoue Masaru, the engineer who built Japan's first railway network and who wanted to prove that European-style agriculture could work on Japanese soil. He chose a stretch of barren volcanic ash at the foot of Mount Iwate, land nobody else wanted. Two partners financed the venture: Ono Gian, vice-president of Nippon Railway, and Iwasaki Yanosuke, head of Mitsubishi. The name Koiwai is assembled from the first character of each surname, Ono, Iwasaki and Inoue.

The designated buildings cluster in three districts. Shimomaru holds administration, Kamimaru the dairy operation, and Nakamaru the arable division that produced feed. That division of labour has barely changed in a century and a quarter.

The Agency for Cultural Affairs designated the group under the criterion of high historical value, describing it as a set of core structures for a farm founded to pursue Western methods, in which the latest technology of each successive period was adopted and improved upon, and which shows how modern farming developed in Japan.

What the Buildings Record

The headquarters office of 1903 is a timber building of 252.49 square metres with an iron-sheet roof and a small tower, the oldest of the administrative structures and the visual anchor of the Shimomaru district. Nearby stand two headquarters storehouses, the first from 1908 and the second from the middle Meiji period.

At Kamimaru the story is dairying. Number Two Cattle Barn and Number Four Cattle Barn both went up in 1908, each two storeys with a reinforced concrete and timber silo attached to the north face. Number One Cattle Barn followed in 1934 and Number Three in 1935, the latter the largest single structure in the group at 1,109.70 square metres. Number One Silo of 1907 and Number Two Silo of 1908 are brick cylinders, and they are commonly described as the oldest surviving silos in Japan.

Then the odd ones. A brick cold store of 1905 sits under an earth mound. A four-storey timber warehouse of 1916 rises 515.60 square metres over its footprint. A weighing station from the early Shōwa years occupies 35.53 square metres. Four corn cribs stand at the compass points of a single yard, three from the late Meiji period and the northwest one from 1929, and their slatted walls were designed to let wind dry the crop.

A riding stable of 1936, a breeding bull barn of 1917, a members' club of 1914, and storehouses for the cattle and arable divisions complete the list.

Seeing Them

The visitor area is Makiba-en, open 9:00 to 17:00 with last admission at 16:00; hours shift with the season. Green season admission has recently run at around 800 yen for adults and 300 yen for children aged 5 through primary school, but rates vary by season and event, and digital advance tickets are now the standard route, so check the official site before you go.

Nine of the twenty-one buildings can be approached at Kamimaru, the dairy yard across the road from Makiba-en. Park entry includes an automatic gate pass for it, and a small shuttle bus runs across if you would rather not walk. Around 300 cows live there. Viewing points inside Number One and Number Three barns let you watch them, and before about 10:00 they are usually still outdoors. Guided tours of the Important Cultural Property buildings run from Makiba-en for an additional fee, and some of them reach areas otherwise closed to visitors.

The remaining twelve buildings are within the working farm and cannot be visited. Makiba-en addresses this with the Koiwai Farm Important Cultural Property Gallery, which uses digital reconstructions to cover what the walking route misses.

Photography is unrestricted in the public areas. Behind the Kamimaru barns stands a stone monument carrying lines from Miyazawa Kenji's long poem Koiwai Farm, written after the poet walked in from Koiwai Station. The cherry avenue there flowers in late April, later than most of Japan. From Morioka the farm is about 30 minutes by car.