Fukuda Family Residence

About the Fukuda Family Residence

The Fukuda Family Residence (福田家住宅, Fukuda-ke Jūtaku) in Higashisako, Noichi-cho, Konan City, Kochi Prefecture, is a Taishō-period house compound whose eight structures, from a storehouse of 1919 to a main house, office, gate and walls of around 1924, were registered as Registered Tangible Cultural Properties on August 21, 2002.

At the time of registration the address was the town of Noichi, which merged with four neighbors on March 1, 2006 to form Konan City.

The Fukuda Family Residence was a place of business as well as a home. The Agency for Cultural Affairs describes the Western-style reception wing as doubling as the office of a brewery, and the gate as serving both the business and the household. What the family brewed is not stated.

Eight Registrations, Three Criteria

All eight structures were entered on the national register (Registered Tangible Cultural Property) on the same day, under the consecutive numbers 39-0056 to 39-0063. Each was registered under one of three criteria.

• Setting a model for architectural design: the main house, the guest hall and annex, the reception wing, and the outer wall
• Difficult to reproduce: the storehouse and guardhouse, and the gate
• Contributing to the historic landscape: the bath and toilet building, and the garden gate and partition wall

The first group stands out. Alongside the timber main house and the earthen-walled guest hall, a reinforced concrete office and a concrete boundary wall were judged to be design models in their own right.

Layout and Building Sequence

Read together, the eight database entries give a fair picture of the Fukuda Family Residence plan. The main house stands in the middle of the lot, its ridge running east to west. The guest hall and annex occupy the northwest corner. The reception wing adjoins it on the south, followed by the storehouse and then the gate. The bath and toilet building lies east of the reception wing and storehouse and connects to the southwest end of the main house.

The garden gate leads from the front of the main entrance into the south garden, and the outer wall wraps the south, east and north sides. With the guest hall, reception wing, storehouse and gate lined up along the west edge, and the reception wing facing west, the public face of the compound appears to have been on that side.

The database dates run as follows.

• Storehouse and guardhouse: 1919
• Guest hall and annex: 1923
• Main house: 1924
• Reception wing, bath and toilet building, gate, garden gate and partition wall, outer wall: around 1924

Six of the eight date to around 1924, so most of the compound took shape within a few years.

Timber, Earthen Walls and Concrete

The Fukuda Family Residence mixes three ways of building. The main house, the bath and toilet building and the garden gate are timber. The storehouse and the guest hall are Dozo-zukuri, with thick plastered earthen walls. The reception wing, the gate, the outer wall and the garden partition wall are reinforced concrete.

The Agency for Cultural Affairs counts the reception wing and the gate among the earliest reinforced concrete work in Kochi Prefecture, and credits the outer wall, with the reception wing, for bringing modern design to the district.

Local plastering craft appears right beside it. The gables of the main house carry Kote-e plaster relief, the storehouse wall is finished in Tosa-shikkui with two courses of Mizukiri-gawara rain tiles, and the same tiles make the two-storey guest hall read as four tiers. New material and old craft, used side by side on one property in the same few years, are what set the Fukuda Family Residence apart.

Visiting and Access

The owner of the Fukuda Family Residence is not named in the Agency for Cultural Affairs database, and neither Konan City nor Kochi Prefecture lists open days or a way to arrange a visit (checked September 27, 2026). Please stay outside the property and view it from the street. If you take photographs, avoid capturing the household.

The nearest station is Noichi on the Tosa Kuroshio Railway Gomen-Nahari Line, reached from JR Kochi Station with a change at Gomen. From Noichi Station the Fukuda Family Residence lies about 3.8 kilometers to the north by road, around 50 minutes on foot.