Oto Family Residence Detached Reception Room

What the Detached Reception Room Is

The Oto Family Residence Detached Reception Room (大藤家住宅離座敷, Ōtō-ke Jūtaku Hanare-zashiki) in Shiraichi, Takaya-cho, Higashihiroshima City, Hiroshima Prefecture, is a 2-storey annex built around 1929 for a former distilling family, listed as a Registered Tangible Cultural Property on March 13, 2025. It is a timber building with a tiled roof and a building area of 76 square meters.

It stands west of the main house and is joined to it by a 2-storey connecting corridor. The ground floor holds an office and a workroom; the upper floor is given over to reception rooms. Business below and hospitality above, in a single wing.

The Only One Registered for Its Design

The Ōtō detached reception room is register no. 34-0318. Its main house, kettle house and storehouse were all registered for their place in the historic landscape, but this building was registered under a different criterion: as a model of design in its own right.

The Agency for Cultural Affairs closes its description by calling it a neatly and carefully made annex. Higashihiroshima City adds that it is valuable as a record of the kind of reception rooms that well-to-do provincial families built in the early Showa period. What earned the Oto Family Residence Detached Reception Room its place on the register is concentrated almost entirely upstairs.

Alcove, Staggered Shelves and a Built-In Desk

The roof is pantiled (Sangawara-buki) and takes a one-sided hip-and-gable form, the Irimoya-zukuri profile used at one end only.

Upstairs, two Zashiki rooms run east to west as a connected pair, wrapped by corridors on the north and southeast. The western room has all three classic fittings of a formal Japanese reception room: a Tokonoma alcove, Chigaidana staggered shelves and a Tsukeshoin built-in writing desk by the window. Together they make up the standard set of Zashiki-kazari, and here the full set was provided in a room reached from the main house by crossing the upper-floor corridor.

With corridors running along two sides, the upstairs rooms of the Oto Family Residence Detached Reception Room are wrapped by passageway on those two sides.

The Agency's database includes a view of the exterior from the east and a photograph of the alcove.

Seeing the Detached Reception Room

The interior of the Oto Family Residence Detached Reception Room is not normally open. Seen from the main street it lies behind the main house, so little of it shows from outside.

The reception rooms can be seen only when the interior is opened for a local event. They are on the upper floor, and whether you can go up and take photographs is for the organizers of each event to say.