Onkotei (former Parsonage) of the Annaka Church of the

A Samurai's Parlor Within a Christian Pastor's House

Across a narrow lane from the stone façade of Annaka Church's Niijima Jō Memorial Hall stands a building of an entirely different temperament. Onko-tei, the former pastor's residence, is low, wooden, gable-roofed, and quite small — only 115 square meters in footprint. Yet inside this modest 1920 building, two tatami rooms are said to have been transplanted from an Annaka domain chief retainer's mansion: an 8-mat and a 10-mat zashiki whose origins precede the Meiji Restoration. A samurai's parlor turned into a Christian pastor's house. Few places in Japan compress the country's religious and political transformations so quietly into a single floor plan.

Built the Year After the Stone Church

The Niijima Jō Memorial Hall — the main worship hall of the Annaka Church — was completed in 1919 from blocks of Ōya stone hauled in from Tochigi. Its Romanesque silhouette, designed by Furuhashi Ryūtarō, was a grand statement: the parish had marked the thirtieth anniversary of founder Niijima Jō's death with a building meant to last. Onko-tei was built the following year, in 1920 (Taishō 9), on the south plot across the lane. The contrast is deliberate. Where the church reaches upward in stone and stained glass, the pastor's residence sits low and wood-clad, with a hipped-gable roof of sangawara tile running east to west.

The name itself rewards attention. "Onko-tei" (温古亭) draws on the Confucian phrase onko chishin — to warm the old in order to know the new. The choice of name was apt. The new pastor's house was literally warmed by the old: the core 8-mat and 10-mat zashiki are documented in the cultural property record as having been part of an Annaka domain chief retainer's residence. To either side of those preserved rooms, the 1920 construction added a modern household: an entrance and kitchen on the east, a smaller 4.5-mat washitsu on the west, and a half-bay-wide veranda along the south face of the parlors.

Why the Cultural Property Listing

Onko-tei was registered as a Tangible Cultural Property of Japan on November 8, 2004, under the 44th round of national registrations. Its registration number is 10-0120. The criterion cited is the most expansive available — contribution to the historical landscape of the nation — rather than rarity of design or technical achievement. That choice tells you what the Agency for Cultural Affairs considered important: not the carpentry itself, which is unspectacular, but the building's place within an unusually intact ensemble.

Four structures on the church compound carry the same registered status: the Memorial Hall of 1919, Onko-tei of 1920, the Gien-tei (former study of pastor Kashiwagi Gien), and the Mission House (former Beken Residence). Together they preserve the layered physical traces of Gunma's first Christian congregation — a community founded in 1878 by thirty samurai-class converts in a former castle town. Onko-tei's significance is that it carries the deepest layer: actual fabric from the late-Edo samurai household that the congregation's founding generation had grown up inside.

What to Notice

The Core Zashiki

The 8-mat and 10-mat rooms, arranged east to west at the heart of the building, are what the registration record protects. Their proportions, the placement of tokonoma and built-in shelving (where these remain), and the relationship of the rooms to the southern veranda all reflect late-Edo samurai residential conventions rather than Taishō-era housing trends. The half-bay en along the south side is narrow by modern standards but exactly right for the rhythm of stepping into and out of garden.

The East-West Orientation

The building runs east to west, deliberately set crosswise to the lane that separates it from the church. The gable ends face east and west, presenting the long eaves and the row of zashiki to the south sun. This is the orientation of a domestic building rather than a public one, even though the building's purpose — housing the pastor of Gunma's most historically significant church — was profoundly public.

The Quiet Counterweight to the Stone Hall

Standing on the lane between the two buildings rewards a few minutes' patience. To the north, the Ōya stone of the Memorial Hall feels imported, ambitious, slightly foreign. To the south, Onko-tei looks like it has always been there. The compound was built to operate as a whole: the worship that happened in stone was prepared and supported in wood.

The Pastor Who Lived Here

Onko-tei was constructed during the long pastorate of Kashiwagi Gien, who served Annaka Church from 1897 until his retirement in 1935. Kashiwagi was an unusual figure — a former Buddhist temple son who became one of Meiji and Taishō Japan's most outspoken Christian pastors. From his desk at Annaka, he edited the monthly Jōmō Kyōkai Geppō (1898–1936), in which he criticized the Ashio copper mine pollution, opposed the abolition of state-licensed prostitution, defended Korean residents during the 1923 massacres, and consistently rejected the militarism of the 1930s. The Taishō and early Shōwa years he spent here were the most prolific of his life. When you look at the modest scale of Onko-tei, it helps to know that a remarkable amount of social conscience went out from these rooms.

The Annaka Castle Town Walk

The church and pastor's residence sit on the upper edge of what was once Annaka Castle, on a parallel street one step above the old Nakasendō. Annaka is unusual among Gunma towns in that several Edo-period civic structures have been carefully restored within a few minutes' walk of the church:

• Former Annaka Domain Bukenagaya (samurai row house) — a four-unit terrace of low-ranking samurai housing, reconstructed from old plans and surviving fabric. Just east of the church.
• Former Annaka Domain Kōri-bugyō Residence — the home of the rural magistrate, restored in the mid-1990s. Useful for picturing the type of samurai residence whose rooms now sit inside Onko-tei.
• Niijima Jō's Former Home — the relocated residence of Annaka Church's founder, preserved as a small museum on Annaka 1-chōme.
• Annaka Castle Site — the central enclosure is now an elementary school, but the stone marker and the layout of streets above the Nakasendō still read clearly.

Walking the loop from Annaka Station up through these sites takes a comfortable half day. The church compound and Onko-tei make the most coherent visit if combined with the Bukenagaya and Kōri-bugyō Residence, since those buildings show what the imported zashiki in Onko-tei would once have stood within.