Former Kai Family Residence

The Former Kai Family Residence and the Kai brewing house

The Former Kai Family Residence (旧甲斐家住宅, Kyū Kai-ke Jūtaku) is the compound of a brewing merchant family at 4611-1 Aza Itchome in Kitakata City, Fukushima Prefecture, whose storehouses, main house, gates and walls, finished largely in 1923, are listed as 10 Registered Tangible Cultural Properties. Locals also call it the Kyū Kai-ke Kura Jūtaku or the Kai Honke Kurazashiki, and it carries the nickname Ujō, the "Crow Castle", after the black Shikkui plaster laid on its storehouse walls. Kitakata City credits the nickname to Asahi Shimbun reporter Ikeuchi Noriaki, who borrowed it from the black-walled Okayama Castle.

The compound stands on the west bank of the Tazuke River in Koarai, the old town strung along the Atsushio Kaidō road. Kitakata still has more than 4,000 storehouses, and the Former Kai Family Residence has long been treated as the grandest of them in both size and materials.

A family of brewers

According to the family history that Kitakata City compiled from documents kept by the Kai household, the founder was a man named Yoichi who came from Shinshū (present-day Nagano) to the nearby village of Yoshishida at the start of the Genroku era, around the 1690s. In the last years of the shogunate the first Kichigorō moved to the present site and switched from the Shinto priesthood to sake brewing. Every later head of the house took the name Kichigorō, and in the early Meiji years the family sake was sold as Tōgō.

The third Kichigorō was a skilled maker of kōji, the rice mold used in brewing, and he built a silk-reeling mill to trade with the newly opened port of Yokohama. His son, the fourth head, closed both the mill and the sake business and began brewing miso and soy sauce under the trade name Fundō Kai. A keen builder, he toured notable houses as far away as Kyoto and Hokkaido with master carpenter Usami Yoshirō before breaking ground in 1917. The storehouse parlor, the shop storehouse, the main house and the garden are said to have been finished in 1923, seven years later by Japanese reckoning.

Work began with foundations for the whole site. Once the outer shells of the storehouses stood, the old house was pulled down and the family moved into temporary quarters while the new main house went up; the storehouse interiors were fitted out last. Garden designer Matsumoto Kamekichi lived on site with two or three apprentices to lay the stones, and about 90 laborers a day worked on the garden foundations. The cost is put at 150,000 or 300,000 yen in the money of the day, but the fourth Kichigorō handled the accounts himself and no firm figure survives.

How the compound is laid out

At its widest the site measures about 51 meters both east to west and north to south. The shop storehouse and the front gate face the Atsushio Kaidō on the east side; the main house runs back from the shop, and the storehouse parlor stands at the western end, the two wrapping around a garden. North of the shop, at the back of a second garden, the soy sauce storehouse joins the parlor. The miso and koji storehouse fills the southwest corner, with the rear gate just north of it opening onto the street behind. A small Inari shrine, the household shrine, sits in the southwest corner of the garden south of the main house.

Brick walls close the circuit. The east and north walls run from the shop storehouse along the road and the northern boundary as far as the parlor, and the south wall follows a lane to the koji storehouse. Read together, the storehouses, gates and walls of the Former Kai Family Residence form one continuous outline, which is why the 10 listings make most sense as a set.

The listings came in three rounds. The storehouse parlor was registered on April 24, 2001, and is described as the first Registered Tangible Cultural Property in Kitakata. The shop storehouse and the soy sauce storehouse followed on October 12, 2001. On October 14, 2021, seven more were added: the main house, the miso and koji storehouse, the Inari shrine, the front and rear gates, the east and north walls, and the south wall. The miso and koji storehouse dates from the late Meiji period (1898 to 1912) and is the oldest; the other nine are from the Taishō period.

Kitakata City bought the property in December 2016, and from April 2017 the Kitakata Tourism and Local Products Association ran it. The garden was laid out together with the buildings, and the city describes it as a prefecturally designated scenic garden.

Conservation work and how to visit

The Former Kai Family Residence has been closed since April 2023 for conservation work, and regular visits are not possible. Disasters and age had cracked the structure and stripped plaster from the walls, and a seismic assessment found the buildings too weak, so the city is repairing and reinforcing them through fiscal 2030. It is the first project in Kitakata to use the exemption from the Building Standards Act for historic buildings, and the city says the work follows the original methods so that carpenters and plasterers can pass the skills on. In 2025 the shop storehouse, the parlor and the soy sauce storehouse were structurally reinforced.

About once a year during the works the city holds a special opening of the interiors. The fiscal 2025 opening took place on March 22, 2026, in three sessions of up to 10 people each, booked in advance; visitors wore hard hats and saw the reinforcement work and the rooms. The next special opening is planned for March 2027, with dates and booking details to be announced by Kitakata City. The city website also hosts VR walk-throughs recorded before and during the repairs.

The address is 4611 Aza Itchome, Kitakata. From Kitakata Station on the JR Ban'etsu West Line it is about a 30-minute walk; by car it is about 25 minutes from the Aizu-Wakamatsu interchange on the Ban'etsu Expressway. Inquiries go to the Tourism and Local Products Office of the city's Commerce, Industry and Tourism Division (phone 0241-24-5296).

Because roads run along the east, west and south sides, the shop storehouse, the front gate and the brick walls of the Former Kai Family Residence can still be seen from the street during the closure, though scaffolding or protective sheeting may cover parts of them at some stages of the work.