Ishida Family Main House

A Farmhouse at the Foot of the Hills

The Ishida Residence Main House (石田家住宅主屋, Ishida-ke Jūtaku Shuoku) is a late Edo-period farmhouse in the Ōgawara district of Okuma, Futaba District, Fukushima Prefecture, entered on Japan's national register of Tangible Cultural Properties on 5 December 2019. It carries registration number 07-0227 and was listed in the 94th round of registrations, together with three other structures on the same plot.

The date deserves a second look. On 10 April 2019, the evacuation order covering Ōgawara was lifted, the first part of Okuma to reopen after the accident at the Fukushima Daiichi Nuclear Power Station in March 2011. The town moved its offices into a new hall in the district that May. Eight months later, four buildings on a farmstead a short distance away were added to the national register.

The house itself sits well back from the road, in the middle of the rear half of its plot, facing south toward the hills that rise behind Okuma's central belt. The Agency for Cultural Affairs records it as single-storey timber construction with a tiled roof and a building area of 230 square metres, built at some point between 1830 and 1868. The roof was thatched when it went up. A renovation around 1958 replaced the thatch with sangawara pantiles and rebuilt the roof truss underneath to carry the different load; a further extension followed around 1970.

Why the Register Took It In

Registration under the Tangible Cultural Property system is a lighter touch than designation as an Important Cultural Property. It is aimed at buildings roughly fifty years old or more that merit keeping, and it leaves the owner free to go on using the place. The Ishida house was accepted under the criterion covering structures that contribute to the historic character of the national landscape.

What the assessors were looking at was rank. The Hamadōri, the coastal strip of Fukushima that runs between the Abukuma highlands and the Pacific, had a farming society with clear internal gradations, and a house of this size and finish belonged near the top of it. Two hundred and thirty square metres under one roof is a large footprint for a nineteenth-century farmhouse. The irimoya roof form, hipped above and gabled at the apex, was not the humblest option available to a village builder either.

Very few pre-modern farmhouses survive in this part of Fukushima with their layout legible. The district spent more than eight years under an evacuation order, and buildings left unheated and unaired through that many winters rarely come out the other side intact.

Reading the Plan

The interior is arranged as six rooms in two rows of three, running north and south. This is the arrangement Japanese architectural historians call a six-room plan, and in a farmhouse it means the household had space to separate daily life from the reception of guests.

The room that settles the question is the zashiki at the far western end of the back row. It has a toko (a recessed alcove for hanging a scroll and setting a flower arrangement), a tana (staggered display shelves beside it), and a tsukeshoin (a built-in desk alcove with a window, descended from a monk's writing shelf). Those three fittings together make up the complete formal set of the shoin style. A farming family that installed all three was a family expecting to receive people who would notice.

Look up in the older parts of the house and the roof structure is younger than the walls beneath it, a consequence of the 1950s re-roofing. Look at the eaves line from the garden and the proportions still read as a thatched building, because the frame was never redesigned, only re-covered.

The house remains in private hands and is not open on a regular schedule. There is no ticket office and no set visiting hours. The exterior can be seen from the public road that runs past the plot, and this is as far as a casual visitor should go: people live and work in Ōgawara, and the site is somebody's property rather than an attraction. The town has occasionally opened the house for organised events. In January 2023, a group of about twenty people gathered there with a municipal curator for a talk on the building, cleaning work in the main house and garden, and a guided walk to nearby sites including Hachiman Shrine and a hyakumanben stone monument. Anyone hoping to see inside should contact Okuma Town Hall (0240-23-7568) and ask what is planned.

Getting there means driving. The Okuma interchange on the Jōban Expressway is roughly ten minutes away by car, and Ōno Station on the JR Jōban Line, which reopened in March 2020, is a similar distance in the other direction. Public transport within the town is thin.