Former Shimousa Imperial Ranch (Sarizuka Memorial Park)

A House That Changed Its Name Three Times

The Kihinkan Guesthouse of the Former Shimofusa Imperial Stock Farm (旧下総御料牧場（三里塚記念公園）貴賓館, Kyū Shimofusa Goryō Bokujō Kihinkan, also transliterated Kyu Shimousa Goryo Bokujo Kihinkan) is a single-storey timber building of 1876 in Sanrizuka Memorial Park, Narita City, Chiba Prefecture, entered on Japan's Register of Tangible Cultural Properties on 3 December 2024.

Nothing in that name describes what the building was for during its first four decades.

It began as a private residence. In the mid-1870s the Meiji government was importing foreign expertise at speed, and among the specialists hired to raise Japan's livestock output was an American recorded in Japanese sources as Appujōnzu (アップジョーンズ). A house was put up for him at Ryōgoku in Tokura village, Inba District, in what is now the city of Tomisato. It was built in an entirely Japanese idiom: timber frame, tatami, sliding screens, no concession to the tastes of the man who would live in it.

After he left his post, the house became the office of the Shimofusa Sheep Farm. It kept that role through the 1880 merger with the Tokkō Breeding Station, which produced the Shimofusa Stock Breeding Station. In 1888 the operation passed under the Imperial Household Ministry and was renamed the Shimofusa Imperial Stock Farm; the building was dismantled, carted several kilometres east, and reassembled at Sanrizuka, where it carried on as the farm office.

The change that gave it its present name came in 1919. A new office block went up, and the old one was freed for a different purpose. Under the Imperial Household Ministry it was rebuilt internally as a kihinkan, a guesthouse, for entertaining foreign ministers and ambassadors and for lodging members of the imperial family who came to inspect the herds. That renovation introduced Western rooms into a Japanese farmhouse plan, and the collision of the two is what a visitor sees today.

Why the Building Was Registered

Japan maintains two parallel systems for protecting historic buildings. Designation (shitei) applies stringent controls to a small number of properties of the highest rank, such as National Treasures and Important Cultural Properties. Registration (tōroku), created in 1996, is a lighter instrument aimed at the far larger body of buildings from the Meiji period onward that are useful, alterable, and at risk of quiet demolition. The Kihinkan belongs to the second category, registered under criterion (1): contribution to the historic landscape of the nation.

The Agency for Cultural Affairs record gives the essentials. One building, timber, single storey, thatched with tile in part, floor area 279 square metres. Registration number 12-0326, granted in the 108th round of registrations on 3 December 2024, on the same day as the air-raid shelter that sits behind it.

What earns the entry is the survival of an object that ought not to have survived. The farm it belonged to no longer exists at Sanrizuka. In 1969 the Shimofusa Imperial Stock Farm was moved to Takanezawa in Tochigi Prefecture to clear land for New Tokyo International Airport, now Narita International Airport, and the flat, well-drained ground that had recommended the site for sheep in 1875 recommended it for runways ninety years later. Narita City acquired the guesthouse when the farm was broken up. In 1990 the city carried out a restoration aimed at returning the interior and exterior to something close to their 1919 state.

So the building is a fragment of a vanished institution, standing about two kilometres from the airport that displaced it.

What to Look For on a Visit

Approach from the south, the way guests would have. The roof is a hipped thatch, heavy and low, and the entrance sits off-centre toward the western end of the south elevation. A service wing containing the bath and lavatory projects at the north-east corner. From this side the building reads as a substantial country house of the late nineteenth century and gives no hint of what lies inside.

Then walk around to the north.

The wall here is horizontal weatherboarding, and the windows are double-hung sashes that slide vertically, a Western fitting that Japanese carpenters of the period adopted for rooms meant to be used with chairs. Above them, the thatch continues unbroken. Weatherboard beneath thatch is an unusual pairing, and the Agency for Cultural Affairs description singles it out as the building's distinguishing feature. The two elevations belong to different architectural cultures joined at the ridge.

The plan explains the contradiction. A corridor runs east to west through the middle of the building. South of it, facing the garden, are tatami rooms in a row. North of it is the Western hall, floored rather than matted, lit by those sash windows. Guests could be received in either register depending on who they were, which was the point of the 1919 conversion.

Visitors have long reported that some of the glazing retains old, slightly uneven Meiji-period glass, which distorts the view of the lawn in a way modern float glass does not. Staff at the memorial hall a short walk away are generous with this kind of detail and will often walk visitors over to the building and talk through what they are seeing.

General entry to the interior is not available; the Kihinkan is viewed from outside, and the path brings you close enough to read the joinery. The surrounding park is free and open, with an avenue of horse chestnuts running from the gate, literary monuments to the writers Mizuno Yōshū and Takamura Kōtarō, and stone memorials to the imported stallions that shaped early Japanese racing. Sanrizuka Memorial Park appears on the national list of one hundred notable historic parks, and its cherry trees draw crowds in early April.