Satataki Villa

A Taisho House With Its Contents Intact

Sataki Bettei (佐滝別邸, さたきべってい, the Sataki villa) is a two-storey timber residence with a belvedere at Umenai, Kaminaridaira 285-2 in Sannohe Town, Aomori Prefecture, completed in 1925 (Taisho 14) and entered on the national register of Tangible Cultural Properties on 15 February 2000. It stands at the furthest point of the Sato family holding, behind the shop and storehouses on the Yokamachi frontage.

Most surviving houses of this period have lost their insides. Fittings get replaced, wallpaper is stripped, light fixtures are modernised, and the furniture is sold or dispersed among heirs. What remains is a shell that can be dated and admired but no longer read as a place where particular people lived in a particular decade.

Sataki Bettei is the other case. Sannohe Town records that the original interior survives as a complete set: the joinery and sliding fittings, the floor coverings, the wallpaper, the furnishings and the lighting. The Agency for Cultural Affairs adds that the furniture from the time of construction remains in good condition. The house has kept the objects that give a room its temperature.

Two Wings, Two Registers of Living

The building pairs a two-storey Western wing with a single-storey Japanese wing built in the sukiya manner. This arrangement was standard among wealthy Japanese households from the late Meiji period onward, and it reflects a practical division rather than indecision. The Western rooms handled reception, business callers and display. The Japanese rooms handled daily life, sleeping and the seasonal rituals of the household.

Sukiya-zukuri is the domestic style that grew out of the tea house: slender members, restrained proportions, natural materials used with deliberate irregularity, and an avoidance of the formal symmetry of shoin architecture. The Agency for Cultural Affairs describes the Japanese wing here as being of high quality, which in this vocabulary means the timber selection and the joinery bear examination at close range.

Above the Western wing rises the feature that identifies the building at a distance. A three-storey octagonal belvedere (boro) sits on top of the two-storey block. Belvederes appeared on Japanese houses and public buildings from the Meiji period as a way of announcing a building and of looking out over the surrounding country. Making it octagonal rather than square doubles the number of corners a carpenter has to resolve, and doubles the number of framed views from inside.

The roof is tiled with sections in sheet copper. Registered building area is 61 square metres.

Stained glass appears among the fittings, and the Agency for Cultural Affairs record calls out the refinement of the design in these elements. Stylistic details and ornament are distributed with judgement across the building rather than concentrated in one showpiece room.

The Horie-gumi Connection, and Some Discrepancies

Design and construction were carried out by the Horie-gumi of Hirosaki, the same firm responsible for Sataki Honten, the reinforced concrete shop on the family's Yokamachi plot. The Horie-gumi had built its reputation on Western-style work in the Tsugaru region, and the Sato family used it twice within roughly a year. Both buildings date from the mid 1920s, and both were registered as models of design (造形の規範となっているもの).

Two points in the published record deserve care.

The first concerns structure. The Agency for Cultural Affairs records the building as timber, two storeys, tiled roof with sections in sheet copper, 61 square metres, with belvedere. Sannohe Town describes it as timber and mortar construction. The national database is the primary record; the town's wording may reflect a rendered finish over the timber frame rather than a different structural system.

The second concerns address. The Agency for Cultural Affairs and the Aomori Prefecture property list both place the villa at Umenai, Kaminaridaira 285-2, while the prefecture's individual page for the villa gives Yokamachi, and Sannohe Town treats the villa as part of the Sato family plot. The two locations are close enough that the plot may straddle an administrative boundary, but the point has not been publicly clarified.

Visiting Sataki Bettei

Aomori Prefecture records Sataki Bettei as closed to the public (非公開). This is a private residence on private land, and there is no arrangement for interior visits. Anyone wishing to learn more about the Sato family buildings should contact the Sannohe Town Board of Education on 0179-20-1157 before travelling. Photography arrangements are not published.

The gate and wall that enclose the villa are separately registered and are listed by the prefecture as open, which makes them the part of this property a visitor can realistically see. They stand on the back street, because the villa's entrance faces that way.

Sannohe Station on the Aoimori Railway is the nearest rail access, located in neighbouring Nanbu Town and roughly ten minutes by car from the Yokamachi area. A taxi operator works from Yokamachi 54-3, and the town runs a community bus at a flat 100 yen fare. By car, allow about fifty minutes from the Hachinohe interchange on the Tohoku Expressway.