Fukuoka Prefectural Rush Industry Hall, Former Night Duty Quarters

The Room Where Somebody Stayed the Night

The Former Night Duty Quarters of the Fukuoka Prefectural Rush Industry Hall (福岡県い業会館旧宿直棟, Fukuoka-ken Igyō Kaikan Kyū Shukuchoku-tō, also written Igyo Kaikan Kyu Shukuchoku-to) is a single-storey wooden annexe of 1936 in Oki Town, Mizuma District, Fukuoka Prefecture, entered on Japan's national register of Tangible Cultural Properties on 17 August 2020. It housed the shukuchoku, the staff member who remained on the premises overnight.

Night duty was ordinary practice in Japanese offices and schools before the war. Someone slept on site to watch for fire, to deter theft and to deal with anything that arrived outside working hours. That person needed a room to sleep in, and often a kitchen. Purpose-built quarters of this kind existed by the thousand across the country and were among the first parts of an office complex to be demolished once the custom lapsed. Few survive with a formal designation attached.

This one does, because it was registered together with the main office building it serves. The two were assessed as a pair, and the citation from the Agency for Cultural Affairs treats the annexe as valuable alongside the main building for what the pair records about the modernisation of a regional industry.

Japanese Detailing Against a Western Neighbour

The annexe connects to the main building through the service entrance on its west side. The two touch, yet they were built in different languages. The main building presents clapboard walls with applied vertical members in the American Stick Style; the annexe is unambiguously Japanese, timber-framed and single-storeyed, under an irimoya hipped-and-gabled roof, with plaster above and vertical boarding running along the lower wall as a skirt.

Inside there are two rooms in a row, one of eight mats and one of six, with a kitchen at the back. That is a house plan, not an office plan. Anyone familiar with Japanese domestic building will recognise the sequence immediately, and the recognition is the point: a person had to live here, not merely work.

A note on dating. The Agency's record enters the period as 1936 with a second date of 1943, and a renovation in 2017. The first figure is the year of construction, shared with the main building; the second presumably marks alteration or extension, though published sources do not say what was done in 1943. Registration was granted under the criterion for structures contributing to the historic landscape of the nation, as number 40-0175, in the 96th round. The building measures 57 square metres in area under a tiled roof.

Seeing It, and the Landscape Around It

Access is by prior arrangement. The complex is still the working address of rush-trade organisations, so Oki Town asks visitors to telephone before coming. Weekdays 9:00 to 17:00; closed Saturdays, Sundays and public holidays; no admission charge. Photography indoors depends on the occupants, so ask when you arrive.

Come for the contrast. Walk in the front of the main building, past the entrance display of dyed rush mats and a hand loom, then out through the service door on the west, and the register changes under your feet: painted boards give way to tatami. Standing in the eight-mat room, look back at the plastered wall and the vertical boarding of the skirt, both plain, both cheap to build and easy to repair. The cooperative spent its money on the face it showed to buyers and kept the back of the property in the local idiom.

The setting explains the registration criterion. Oki Town covers 18.44 square kilometres of the Chikugo plain at an elevation of four to five metres, and roughly 14 per cent of that area is water: a network of ditches and channels called kurīku here, whose origins the town traces back to the medieval estate period. Rush grew well in this wet, flat ground, and the fields and channels are still what you see from the road outside.

Hatchōmuta Station on the Nishitetsu Tenjin Ōmuta Line is about 600 metres away, ten minutes on foot to the southwest, local trains only. The station name is written 八丁牟田 while the postal address uses 八町牟田. The main building, registration number 40-0174, is the same visit.