Maiko Park Former Kinoshita Family Residence Barn

The Building at the Back of the Estate

Maiko Park Former Kinoshita Family Residence Barn (舞子公園旧木下家住宅納屋, Maiko Kōen Kyū-Kinoshitake Jūtaku Naya) is a two-storey timber outbuilding at Higashi-Maikochō in Tarumi Ward, Kobe, standing within Hyōgo Prefectural Maiko Park, and it was entered on Japan's national register of Tangible Cultural Properties on 20 November 2001. It covers 27 square metres and is roofed in pantiles.

Twenty-seven square metres is small. The main house on the same plot covers 275, and the storehouse 25. The barn sits at the back of the grounds, north of the storehouse and close to the Sanyo Electric Railway line, which is to say at the point where a carefully composed estate stops composing itself and gets on with the practical business of being a household.

Yet the Agency for Cultural Affairs entry calls it one of the principal constituent elements of the residence, and the reason is the phrase that follows in the same description: a veranda one bay deep runs across the entire south face, on both floors. Barns do not usually get verandas. Upstairs there are two rooms, one of four mats and one of four and a half, while the ground floor is a single undivided space. Rooms of that size, reached from a shaded veranda, read as accommodation rather than storage, which suggests the building served the household staff as well as the household's possessions.

How a Private Villa Became a Public Park Building

The estate was not built by the Kinoshita family whose name it now carries. Hyōgo Prefectural Maiko Park records that Matano Ryōsuke commissioned it as his own residence, a sukiya-style modern Japanese house completed in 1941, with an extension in 1943. In 1952 the property passed to Kinoshita Kichizaemon, and in 2000 the bereaved family of the late Kinoshita Kichijirō gave it to Hyōgo Prefecture. Registration followed in December 2001, covering the main house as number 28-0073, the storehouse as 28-0074 and this barn as 28-0075, in the thirty-first round.

One discrepancy is worth flagging. The park authority dates construction to 1941; the national database gives around 1939 for all three buildings. The gap is small but real, and the extension of 1943 complicates any single answer. Visitors comparing the on-site panels with the database will see both figures.

What survived is the point. The 1995 Great Hanshin earthquake destroyed a great deal of the domestic architecture that had accumulated along this stretch of coast between Kobe and Akashi during the first half of the twentieth century. The Kinoshita estate came through it with the layout of its grounds substantially as built: main house, storehouse, barn, front garden and courtyard on a plot of 2,209 square metres, with a combined building footprint of 343 square metres and 432 square metres of floor area. Registration recognised the whole arrangement, and the barn is part of what makes the arrangement legible.

Reading the Barn from the Outside

The structure runs east to west under a gabled roof of sangawara pantiles, three bays along its length and two across, which in the traditional measure works out to a small rectangle roughly five and a half metres by three and a half. The south veranda, one bay wide and stacked on two levels, gives the little building a front elevation that borrows something from the main house rather than turning its back on it.

That relationship is deliberate on this estate. The main house is a Sukiya composition on an H-shaped plan, its long east-west ridge marked by a mushiko-mado, the plastered lattice window borrowed from townhouse architecture. Around a central core it distributes an entrance to the east, a kitchen to the north-east, a tea room to the north-west, a reception room to the south-east and a Buddhist altar room to the south-west. The national database describes it as an example of the Sukiya-style Japanese residence built in the Osaka-Kobe belt in the early Shōwa period. The storehouse, north of the tea room, is a two-storey plastered building with tiled gable ends and carefully worked brackets under its window hoods. The barn completes the sequence of quality that runs from the formal rooms out to the service buildings.

Visiting Maiko Park: What You Can and Cannot See

Here is the practical fact that matters most. The barn is inside the closed zone. Hyōgo Prefectural Maiko Park states plainly that the maid's room, the servants' quarters, the outdoor lavatory and the barn are not open to visitors. The storehouse can be seen from the outside and the courtyard can be looked at from the rooms, but the barn is not on the route.

The main house is very much open, and worth the visit on its own terms. Admission is 100 yen for adults and 50 yen for those aged 70 and over, with high school students and younger admitted free; groups of twenty or more pay 50 and 40 yen respectively. Opening hours run from 10:00 to 17:00 with last entry half an hour before closing, and the house shuts on Mondays, or on Tuesday when Monday falls on a public holiday. A combined ticket at 340 yen covers this house together with the Former Mutō Sanji Residence and the Sun Yat-sen Memorial Hall, the latter an Important Cultural Property designated in 2001. Photography inside the house is generally permitted; ask at reception about any current restrictions.

Getting there takes five minutes on foot from Maiko Station on the JR Kobe Line, from Maiko-kōen Station on the Sanyo Electric Railway, or from the Kōsoku Maiko highway bus stop. There is no car park at the residence itself; drivers use the parking in the southern section of Maiko Park. That southern section is where the Akashi Kaikyō Bridge comes ashore, and the Maiko Marine Promenade runs out inside the bridge girder some 47 metres above the water. A café has opened within the Kinoshita grounds in recent years and monthly tea gatherings have been held in the house; check the park's official pages for current arrangements before planning around either.