Okada Family Main House

A Sake Merchant's House Facing the Old Highway

Okada Family Residence Main House (岡田家住宅主屋, Okada-ke Jūtaku Omoya, also written Okada-ke Jutaku Omoya) is an early Shōwa-period merchant house at Saijō-honmachi in Higashihiroshima City, Hiroshima Prefecture, built between 1926 and 1945 and entered on the national register as a Registered Tangible Cultural Property (Structure) on 4 February 2021.

The house sits on the south side of a street that most visitors know today as Saijō Sakagura-dōri, the sake brewery road. Before it acquired that name it was the Saikoku Kaidō, the highway linking Kyoto with Shimonoseki, and this stretch of it formed the main street of Yokkaichi-juku, a post town. The Okada house faces north onto that road, and the way it meets the street tells you what the family did for a living.

The Okadas were not brewers. They were sake wholesalers, working the distribution side of a trade that made Saijō famous. A wholesaler needed a shop front where business was conducted, storage behind, and living quarters for the household, and the building answers all three needs within a single roof of about 212 square metres of floor area, timber-framed and two storeys high under tile.

Reading the Front Elevation

The roof is irimoya-zukuri tsumairi: hipped at the lower slopes, gabled at the top, and entered from the gable end rather than the long side. Gable-entry houses are less common than the eaves-entry type along Japanese highways, and the triangular gable field gives the street front a vertical emphasis that a low eaves-entry facade never has.

Below that, a wide degōshi runs across the front. A degōshi is a lattice screen set into a bay that projects slightly beyond the wall plane, here carried on the geya, the lower penthouse roof that shelters the ground floor. Lattice of this kind admits light and air to the shop room while keeping the interior shielded from the eyes of people passing on the road.

The second storey is the surprise. Instead of the white plaster that covers most historic buildings in this district, the upper wall is faced in black tile, laid flush and dark against the grey of the roof. At each end of that upper wall stands a sode-udatsu, a short wing wall raised above the roof line at the flank. Udatsu began as fire breaks between adjoining town houses and became, over time, a way of signalling that the household could afford to build one.

Stand across the road and the composition reads as a single deliberate gesture: pale lattice below, black tile above, a wing wall closing each end.

How the Interior Is Arranged

The plan follows the logic of a merchant town house on a long, narrow plot. Along the east side runs the doma, an earth-floored passage that carried goods from the street to the rear of the property without anyone stepping onto the raised floors. West of it lies the mise, the shop room that opens toward the road, and behind the mise four rooms are set out in two rows of two.

At the back the building grows a tsunoya, a wing projecting at an angle from the main block, with the bathhouse joined to it. That rear extension is typical of houses that kept growing as a family business grew, and it explains why the building covers more ground than its street frontage suggests.

None of these rooms can be seen by visitors. The property remains in private hands and is used as business premises, so the account above comes from the Agency for Cultural Affairs record rather than from a tour.

Why It Was Registered

Japan runs two parallel systems for historic buildings. Designation, which produces National Treasures and Important Cultural Properties, is reserved for a small number of buildings and brings tight controls. Registration, introduced in 1996, casts a wider net over buildings roughly fifty years old or more, applies a lighter regulatory touch, and is designed for structures that stay in daily use. The Okada house belongs to the second category.

The criterion cited in its registration is that the building contributes to the historic landscape of the country. Its registration number is 34-0298, issued in the 97th round of registrations. The Council for Cultural Affairs recommended it in July 2020 together with seven other buildings in Higashihiroshima, six of them belonging to the Ōta family in nearby Saijō-okamachi and two, this house and its storehouse, to the Okadas. When the gazette notice appeared the following February, the count of registered buildings in the Saijō sake district reached 81.

That density is the point. A single early Shōwa merchant house would be a modest thing on its own. Set among dozens of registered brewery buildings, chimneys and town houses along one kilometre of road, it becomes part of an argument about how a post town turned into a brewing town and then into a modern industrial district without ever demolishing its past.

Visiting

The house stands roughly five minutes on foot from the south exit of JR Saijō Station, on the Sanyō Main Line about 35 minutes from Hiroshima Station. There is no admission, no opening time and no visitor entrance, because the interior is not open to the public. What you can do is look at it from the public road, which is where its architecture was always meant to be read from.

Photography from the street is not restricted, though the city asks visitors to its cultural properties to be considerate: these are working buildings and private property, and residents and staff use them daily.

Since you will be on Sakagura-dōri anyway, the walk rewards a slower pace. Kamotsuru Brewery's Ichigō-kura, a few minutes west, was designated a National Historic Site in February 2024 as part of the Saijō Sake Breweries group and now houses a brewery shop with tasting. The former Hiroshima Prefectural Brewing Experiment Station, on the Kamoizumi premises, is partly open. Twelve red brick chimneys stand within the district. Seven brewing companies still operate here, and several keep a tasting counter or a shop open to callers.

Saijō is grouped with Nada in Hyōgo and Fushimi in Kyoto as one of the three great sake-producing centres of Japan. The reasons are practical: groundwater from the surrounding hills, good brewing rice, and a basin climate with sharp differences between day and night temperatures during the winter brewing season.