Former Okame Ryokan Main Building

A Taisho-era inn turned to face the river

The Former Okame Ryokan Main Building (旧おかめ旅館本館, Kyū-Okame Ryokan Honkan) is a wooden, 2-storey former inn in Isohama-cho, Oarai Town, Ibaraki Prefecture, built during the Taisho era and listed as a Registered Tangible Cultural Property on October 2, 2007. The Agency for Cultural Affairs records the construction period as Taisho, placing it between 1912 and 1925 in the Western calendar. The listing covers 1 building with a floor footprint of 187 square meters.

The building stands with its north side toward the Hinuma River (涸沼川). The range that runs east and west along the water carries an Irimoya-zukuri roof, and a second range in Yosemune-zukuri extends south at a right angle to it. Both are covered in Sangawara-buki pantiles. Because two different roof forms meet at a right angle, the outline of the Former Okame Ryokan Main Building changes depending on where you stand.

A pent roof runs across the front elevation, and the ground floor carries a degōshi, a latticed bay that projects forward of the wall. The eaves are deep. A purlin called a degeta is carried out past the line of the posts, and heavy rafters sit on top of it to hold the eaves edge. These are han-shige-daruki, Taruki set at an intermediate spacing, and their thickness throws a strong band of shadow under the roof.

Oarai Town describes the mouth of the Hinuma River as the anchor of Isohama, a fishing port since the Edo period that also took in coastal freight and gave shelter to ships in bad weather. The inn was turned north for that reason. Water, not the street, was the face it presented.

Registration No. 08-0226 and the reason for listing

The criterion applied to the Former Okame Ryokan Main Building was that the building contributes to the historic landscape of the country. That test looks less at the rarity of a technique or the age of individual timbers than at how a building has shaped the place it occupies, so the river frontage itself is part of what was assessed. Its registration number is 08-0226.

A Registered Tangible Cultural Property is protected through a light-touch notification system rather than strict controls, on the assumption that the owner keeps using the building. Oarai Town has been putting local structures forward under this scheme, and this listing brought the town's total to 4, after the Takeishi Family Residence Main House (武石家住宅主屋), the annexe of the Museum of the Bakumatsu and Meiji Periods (幕末と明治の博物館別館), and the Onuki Family Residence Main House (大貫家住宅主屋).

The national database files this structure under 産業3次, tertiary industry, the category used for commerce and services, which separates it from houses and religious buildings. Oarai's landscape plan records that restaurants and inns catering to visitors began appearing in the town during the Meiji period, and that by the middle of the Taisho era buses and the Suihin tram had reached the area, turning sea bathing, then known as shiotōji or salt-water cure, into a mass pastime. The Former Okame Ryokan Main Building was put up while that shift was under way.

Read the building from the eaves down

At the Former Okame Ryokan Main Building the eaves take the eye first. The projecting purlin draws one long horizontal line across the elevation, and the rafters resting on it are noticeably stout. Their spacing falls between the tight ranks used in temple work and the wide, plain intervals of an ordinary house. Because the overhang reaches so far out, the wall beneath it stays in shade through most of the day.

The lattice bay on the ground floor repays a second look. The window is pushed forward of the wall and screened with vertical bars, which lets someone inside register the movement of the street while keeping the room itself hard to see into. For a building that once put up paying guests, that arrangement makes practical sense.

The roof rewards walking. From the river side the gable end of the irimoya range faces you squarely. Move round to the road on the south and the hipped planes of the second range come forward instead. Two viewpoints are enough to work out how the Former Okame Ryokan Main Building is put together, and the flat pantiles change color noticeably as the light shifts.

Visiting the Former Okame Ryokan Main Building

The Former Okame Ryokan Main Building is privately owned and no longer trades as an inn. The interior is closed, and visitors see the exterior from the public road. As of 2026 neither Oarai Town nor the Ibaraki Prefectural Board of Education advertises any regular or seasonal opening of the inside.

The nearest station is Oarai on the Kashima Rinkai Railway Oarai Kashima Line, about 700 meters to the south, roughly a 10-minute walk. The railway company gives the journey from Oarai to JR Mito Station as about 15 minutes, so the site fits comfortably into half a day from Mito. Head north from the station, toward the river.

Photography from the road is not restricted. The building is someone's home, though, so avoid stepping onto the property and keep back from the entrance and the windows. Oarai Town has 4 registered buildings in all, the Former Okame Ryokan Main Building among them, and each is still in everyday use by its owner.