Former Morita Family Residence

What the Former Morita Family Residence Is

The Former Morita Family Residence is a late Meiji era estate of 1898 to 1912 at Usaida in Noichicho, Konan City, Kochi Prefecture, whose six structures were listed as National Registered Tangible Cultural Properties on 6 March 2024. The city of Konan owns the property.

The setting is farmland. On the eastern edge of the Kochi Plain, in a village of fields and scattered houses, this one compound presents a run of gates and walls that belongs to a different social register. The Agency for Cultural Affairs describes the main house as a modern Japanese style dwelling carrying the formality of a samurai household. That gap between a farming village and a warrior family's manners is what gives the Former Morita Family Residence its character.

The south side of the compound meets a road. A front gate stands towards the eastern end, a side gate towards the western end, and an earthen wall runs between them. The wall does not stop at the gates. It turns inward and folds the approach into a Masugata, the dog-legged route used at castle entrances, before delivering the visitor to the formal Shikidai entrance of the main house. South east of that entrance a small gate opens to the garden, and west of the main house a two storey storehouse faces east.

The Morita Family and Morita Masatake

Konan City calls the compound the birthplace of Morita Masatake (森田正馬), also read Shoma. Morita was a psychiatrist, born at Usaida in 1874. He entered the medical college of Tokyo Imperial University in 1898 and studied psychiatry under Kure Shuzo. From 1919 he began treating patients with nervous disorders through a form of home hospitalisation, and it was in these years that he established the treatment for neurasthenia and obsessive thought now known as Morita therapy. He received his doctorate in medicine in 1924.

The dates of the buildings and the date of his birth do not line up, and it is worth being clear about this. The national register assigns all six structures to the late Meiji era, between 1898 and 1912. That is more than twenty years after Morita was born in 1874, which means the six buildings standing today are not the ones he was born in. The land and the family are his; the fabric a visitor sees is later. Both statements can be true at once, and visitors to the Former Morita Family Residence should hold them apart.

The municipal record traces the listing. The national Council for Cultural Affairs recommended registration on 24 November 2023, and the properties were entered on the register on 6 March the following year. On 3 February 2024 the city ran a lecture on Morita and an open session at the buildings themselves. That year marked 150 years since his birth on 18 January.

Reading the Six Structures

Each of the six does a different job. From the road, the front gate is the piece that faces you: a single bay Yakuimon, the gate type with two main posts and two rear struts, with short flanking walls to north and south. Its timbers are noticeably thick and the roof carries a slight upward curve. Running west from it, the earthen wall continues for 20 metres, built on a footing of large natural stones with a Sangawara-buki roof over the top.

Near the western end of the wall stands the side gate, another yakuimon but with slender members and plainer work throughout. The front gate received guests; the side gate led to the everyday entrance of the house. The habit of ranking two doorways by formality survives here intact.

Inside the compound the wall wraps around both flanks of the shikidai entrance and bends the path. At that bend, south east of the entrance, the heijumon gate stands, a small copper roofed Munamon, and passing it brings you out into the eastern garden.

The main house is a single storey timber building of 206 square metres, with the shikidai entrance projecting from the centre of the south front under its own hipped and gabled roof. The western half is divided into four rooms on a cross plan, the eastern half given over to formal Zashiki rooms where deep Ranma carvings fill the transoms. West again is the storehouse, a two storey Dozo-zukuri building whose Shikkui walls carry projecting tile courses called mizukiri-gawara that throw rain clear of the plaster. Its roof uses left handed pantiles. Of the six, this is the one that gathers up the local detail of Kochi.

Getting There and What You Can See

The nearest station is Noichi on the Tosa Kuroshio Railway Gomen Nahari Line, about 2.6 kilometres south west of the Former Morita Family Residence in a straight line, roughly 10 minutes by car and about 40 minutes on foot. Konan municipal buses run the Noichi Northern Loop from the station through Usaida at a flat fare of 100 yen, though services are infrequent enough that the city timetable is worth checking first. Kochi Ryoma Airport lies about 6 kilometres away, some 15 minutes by car.

This is not a visitor attraction with opening hours. No admission time or fee is set, and the grounds and interiors are normally closed. What is freely visible is the south frontage from the road: the front gate, the earthen wall and the side gate read clearly from the public way.

To go inside the grounds, or to photograph from within them, contact the Cultural Promotion and Protection Section of the Konan City Board of Education, Lifelong Learning Division, at the Cultural Properties Centre, telephone 0887-54-2296. The city has run guided sessions at the buildings before and announces any opening through its own channels. The lanes here serve houses and fields, so leave the car somewhere sensible rather than on the road.

Details confirmed on 13 September 2026.