Hatanaka Family Residence (Noradokei)

A Clock Tower Built by Hand

The Hatanaka Family Residence (Noradokei) (畠中家住宅（野良時計）, Hatanaka-ke Jūtaku, "Nora-dokei") is a house in Doi, Aki City, Kochi Prefecture, built around 1887, whose main house with its rooftop clock tower and a small storehouse beside it were registered as Registered Tangible Cultural Properties on 20 December 1996. Locally the place is simply called Noradokei, "the field clock", and that is the name Aki City and its tourist association use for it.

The two buildings were entered in the very first round of registrations under the system, and their numbers are 39-0001 for the main house and 39-0002 for the storehouse. In other words, the list of registered buildings in Kochi Prefecture begins here.

The Agency for Cultural Affairs singles out the odd composition of the main house: an irregular plan, with a small pseudo-Western clock tower set on the roof of the wing that projects to the north. It reads the clock as a sign of how modernisation filtered out into the Japanese countryside. The storehouse is valued for the way it pairs with the tower house to form a quiet, much-loved rural view.

Hatanaka Genma and His Homemade Clock

The clockmaker was Hatanaka Genma, a local landowner. According to Aki City, he had been given an eight-sided American wall clock by his father when he was about 10. He took it apart and put it back together again and again until he understood the mechanism, and around 1887 he built the tower clock himself, making every part by hand.

The Aki City Tourist Association tells it slightly differently: the model was the octagonal American clock that hung in the Hatanaka kitchen, and Genma fashioned everything from the gear wheels to the driving weights.

The national record is more cautious. It says the clock was probably made by the head of the household at the time, without giving a name. Genma's name comes from local sources.

Nora means the fields, or field work. In an age when few homes owned a clock, farmers in the surrounding paddies could read the time from a distance, and the nickname followed.

The Two Buildings and Where to Stand

The main house is a 2-storey timber building with a tiled roof and a building area of 126 square metres. Its plan is broken into several blocks, and the clock tower rises from the roof of the northern wing. The storehouse, close by, is a small 2-storey timber building of 21 square metres, finished in the Ōkabe manner so that the posts disappear inside thick plastered walls.

Both stand on the same plot at 638-4 Doi. From the road you take in the tower house and its storehouse in a single view; from across the paddies the outline is clearest, a tiled two-storey roof with one tower sticking up above it.

About 50 metres to the south is a separate estate, the Hatanaka Family Residence at 633 Higashitakazono, Doi, where 9 buildings and walls were registered in 2010. The registration names and addresses of the two estates are different, and no public source we found explains how the two households are related.

Visiting: Access, Parking and Whether the Clock Runs

The Hatanaka Family Residence (Noradokei) is still a private home. The interior is not open, and visitors view the exterior from the road without entering the grounds. There are no set hours or fees for looking from outside; the tourist association suggests allowing about 10 minutes.

Do not count on seeing the hands move. Aki City says the clock is run with the owner's help during the tourist season and at events, while the prefectural tourism site describes it as still keeping time. If a working clock matters to you, ask the Aki Tourist Information Center (tel. 0887-34-8344) before you go.

The nearest station is Aki on the Tosa Kuroshio Railway Gomen-Nahari Line, about 5 minutes away by car or 10 minutes by rental bicycle. Drivers can reach it in about 20 minutes from the Geisei-nishi interchange on the Kochi-Tobu Expressway, or about 50 minutes from the Nankoku interchange on the Kochi Expressway. A free car park on the east side holds 20 cars and has space for large buses.

Aki City also mentions a local project to plant seasonal flowers in front of the house, so in summer the tower may appear above sunflowers, and in autumn above cosmos.