Kuretake Bunko

About Kuretake Bunko

Kuretake Bunko (呉竹文庫, Kuretake Library) is a private library complex on the left bank of the Tedori River mouth in Minatomachi, Hakusan City, Ishikawa Prefecture, and four of its buildings, ranging in date between a storehouse of about 1889 and a tea house of about 1943, became Registered Tangible Cultural Properties on June 29, 2022. It was founded by Kumada Gentarō, a businessman of the old village of Minato, and Hakusan City now runs it as a small museum.

The four registered buildings at Kuretake Bunko are the main house, the stacks and reading room, the storehouse and the tea house. Their registration numbers run consecutively, 17-0304 through 17-0307, and all four belong to Hakusan City. The Agency for Cultural Affairs listed each of them as a model of architectural form.

Kumada Gentarō and the Story of the Library

Kumada Gentarō was born in 1886 and took over the family business in 1903, at seventeen, when his father died. His branch of the Kumada family, trading under the house name Kumagen, came from a line of Kitamaebune shipowners, the merchants whose vessels plied the Sea of Japan coast. Gentarō ran warehousing, shipping and banking concerns and also invested in farmland in Hokkaido.

He was a compulsive reader who bought far more books than he had time for, and he began lending them to friends. In 1915 he built a fireproof storehouse on his own land, turned it into a book stack and opened his collection to the public. In February 1922 he set the library on a formal footing as the Kuretake Bunko Foundation.

By the Taishō era the family lived in Ikeda-machi in Kanazawa. The house at Minatomachi was rebuilt as a second residence in 1928 and the following year, and Kuretake Bunko took roughly its present shape at that time. According to the library's own leaflet, a large shipowner's house had earlier stood facing the road where the garden is now.

Gentarō served four years as head of Minato village from 1923, and after the great Tedori River flood of 1934 he was asked to take the post again and threw himself into the recovery. He died in January 1935, and for decades afterwards the library lay dormant.

In 1990, through the generosity of his heir Kumada Takurō, the former town of Mikawa took over the running of Kuretake Bunko and reopened it to visitors. Hakusan City has operated it directly since April 2011. In 2020 the library's Kitamaebune papers were added to Hakusan's components of the Japan Heritage story devoted to the Kitamaebune ports and shipowners' villages.

The Kuretake Bunko Grounds

Kuretake Bunko sits in a plot screened by bamboo and trees, given in the library's leaflet as 1,396.66 square meters. Reading the Agency's map coordinates together with the library's floor plan, the four registered buildings are arranged like this.

• The main house (1928), a single-storey timber dwelling, stands in the middle of the plot and holds the entrance hall.
• The stacks and reading room (about 1915, extended in 1928) adjoin the main house on the west: a two-storey Dozo-zukuri book stack and a timber reading-room wing share one roof.
• The storehouse (about 1889), once used for kimono and older than the library itself, is joined to the east side of the main house by a corridor and now serves as the exhibition room.
• The tea house (about 1943) stands apart at the eastern edge of the grounds, where the library calls it Kuretake-an.

The main house, the stacks and reading room and the storehouse are linked by corridors, so visitors walk through Kuretake Bunko as one continuous interior. Only the tea house stands on its own in the garden, which also holds a bust of Kumada Gentarō.

Visiting Kuretake Bunko

Kuretake Bunko is open 9:00 a.m. to 4:30 p.m., with last entry at 4:00 p.m. It is closed on Mondays (or the next weekday when Monday is a public holiday), over the New Year period and during special maintenance periods. Admission is 310 yen for adults, 200 yen each for groups of 20 or more, and free for high school students and younger. The ticket also covers the Ishikawa Roots Exchange Museum.

Kuretake Bunko closed temporarily after the 2024 Noto Peninsula Earthquake left the interior unsafe, and it reopened on April 1, 2026.

Photography and food are not allowed inside. The books cannot be borrowed or read, and visitors are asked not to touch the shelves or the exhibits. A few rooms, such as the office and the bathroom, are excluded from the visitor route on the floor plan. The tea house and other rooms can be hired for a fee by applying at reception.

The nearest station is Komaiko on the IR Ishikawa Railway, about 8 to 10 minutes away on foot. By car, Kuretake Bunko is about 8 minutes from the Mikawa interchange on the Hokuriku Expressway, and there is parking for 17 cars. Coming from Kanazawa, turn left immediately after crossing the Mikawa Bridge; from Komatsu, turn right just before it.