Saito Family Residence (Former Morita Family Residence) Main House

A Fishing Magnate's House Above Uchiura Bay

The Main House of the Saitō Residence, formerly the Morita Residence (斉藤家住宅（旧盛田家住宅）主屋, Saitō-ke Jūtaku Shuoku), stands at Washinoki-chō in Mori Town, Kayabe District, Hokkaido. Built in 1902 (Meiji 35), it was entered on Japan's register of Tangible Cultural Properties on 31 July 2007.

The house measures 18 metres along the ridge and 11 metres across, covering 200 square metres. It is timber, single-storey with a partial upper floor, roofed in iron sheet under a simple gable. The site looks out over Uchiura Bay, the broad circular inlet on Hokkaido's southern coast that Japanese maps also label Funka Bay.

Its present address is not where it was built. The house was dismantled and re-erected on this site in 2006, the year before registration.

What Makes It an Amimoto House

The Agency for Cultural Affairs records the building as preserving the characteristics of an amimoto dwelling of the Oshima region. An amimoto was the owner of the nets and boats, the household that financed a coastal fishery and employed the crews who worked it. Along the Hokkaido coast these families built the largest houses in their villages, and the buildings had to do two jobs at once: run a business and receive people of standing.

Both jobs are legible in the plan. The raised floor area is arranged in the ta-no-ji pattern, four rooms in a two-by-two grid named for the character 田 whose crossed strokes it resembles. This was the standard layout of a substantial rural house, and it let the family shift between everyday use and formal reception by opening or closing sliding partitions. Within that framework the house carries a refined zashiki reception suite, finished to a level well above what farming households of the same period would have commissioned.

Registration was granted under the criterion for structures that serve as a model of design, with registration number 01-0092.

Details Worth Slowing Down For

The front elevation is where the carpentry shows. The eave along the façade is built out as segai-zukuri, a method that carries the eave line forward on projecting arms and an outer purlin, throwing the roof much further from the wall than an ordinary eave would reach. Beneath it, a secondary pent roof runs the full 18-metre length of the front.

Two layers of shelter, one above the other. On a coast that takes snow off the sea and wind straight down the bay, depth of eave is not decoration.

At floor level the façade carries degōshi, a projecting wooden lattice screen set forward of the wall plane. Lattice of this kind admits daylight, gives those inside a view of the approach, and keeps the interior private from the road.

Practical matters need care here. The Agency for Cultural Affairs record lists no owner, and no public opening arrangements have been announced, so the house should be treated as a private property without visitor access. Anyone hoping to see it should contact the Mori Town Board of Education before travelling rather than turning up at the gate. Mori Station on the JR Hakodate Main Line is about four kilometres away, ten minutes or so by car. The same district holds the Washinoki Site, a nationally designated historic site whose Jōmon-period stone circle of roughly 4,000 years ago was included in the World Heritage listing for the Jōmon Prehistoric Sites in Northern Japan.