Former Okada Clinic

The Former Okada Clinic Storehouse: A Doctor's Kura in a Cotton Town

At the northeast corner of a walled compound in Okada, an old textile town on Japan's Chita Peninsula, sits a storehouse with a footprint of barely twenty square meters. Its lower walls are sheathed in horizontal weatherboard; the upper story is coated in coarse, pebbled mortar finished in what Japanese builders of the 1920s called the "German wall" style. Iron grilles guard the windows, and small cast-iron brackets carry the narrow eaves. For so plain a structure, the care taken over it is hard to miss.

This is the storehouse of the former Okada Clinic (Kyū Okada Iin), the compound known today as Masayasu-tei after the army doctor who built it. The clinic opened in 1929, and the storehouse is recorded as dating to around 1931. A Japanese kura was the household strongroom, built thick-walled and fire-resistant to protect valuables, documents, and seasonal goods. A physician's kura would have held medicines, instruments, and patient records well out of harm's way.

What "Registered" Means Here

The storehouse carries the status of Registered Tangible Cultural Property (Toroku Yukei Bunkazai), and the distinction matters. Japan's older and stricter system designates outstanding works as National Treasures or Important Cultural Properties, freezing them under tight controls. The registration system, introduced in 1996, is a lighter touch. It is aimed at buildings roughly half a century old or more that contribute to the character of their surroundings, and it encourages owners to keep the buildings in use rather than seal them away.

The Okada storehouse was registered on 17 November 2015 as registration number 23-0445, under the criterion that it contributes to the historic landscape of the country. It did not enter the register alone. Six elements of the compound were listed together: the main house, the clinic building, this storehouse, a smaller tool storehouse, a reinforced-concrete water tower, and a boundary wall. Read as a set, they preserve the working layout of a country doctor's residence from the early Shōwa years.

The Soldier-Doctor Who Built It

Takeuchi Masayasu was born in 1882 and qualified in 1905 from the Aichi Prefectural Medical College, the institution that became Nagoya University's medical school. His career was military. He served as an army surgeon in Manchuria and at posts in Kurume, Wakayama, and Kokura, rising to the rank of surgeon colonel and the directorship of the Toyohashi Army Hospital, today the Toyohashi Medical Center.

On leaving the army he came to the town of Okada and opened his clinic in 1929. He chose the Japanese-Western eclectic manner fashionable from the late Taishō into the early Shōwa period: a Western-style consulting room and parlor on one side, Japanese rooms ringed by corridors on the other, and a garden said to have been laid out by a noted tea master. By tradition the master carpenter was Takeuchi Kakuzō, the builder of the town's Kiraku-za playhouse, though the attribution is not firmly documented.

Masayasu meant for his eldest son Kazuo, a doctor practicing in Nagoya, to carry on the practice. Kazuo died in the Pacific War, and the succession never happened. Masayasu kept the clinic going until 1950, after which the buildings passed through use as family lodgings and, for a time, as another physician's premises. A volunteer committee now manages the compound.

What to Look For

The storehouse rewards a slow look. The clearest feature is the split between its two floors: plain weatherboard below, rough mortar above. That "German wall" finish, a pebble-dash rendering troweled to a deliberately uneven surface, was a small modernist flourish that crept into provincial Japanese building between the wars, and it sits oddly and pleasingly on what is otherwise a traditional gabled kura roofed in sangawara pantiles.

Step close and the details accumulate. Cast-iron corbels, decorative rather than merely structural, prop the little eave hood. Heavy iron bars screen the openings. Inside, the roof is framed with bow-shaped beams, and the corners are pinned with diagonal hiuchibari braces that keep the small box rigid; the interior walls are finished in white plaster. None of this was necessary in a storehouse of twenty square meters. It tells you the doctor wanted the whole compound built to one standard.

The storehouse is best understood as one piece of the larger Masayasu-tei. The former clinic building now houses a hand-weaving workshop called Tsumonoki, which keeps alive the local cotton craft, while the main house serves for events and rentals. The water tower, a small concrete tank raised on four pillars some 2.8 meters tall, once held a day's worth of well water for the household and the surgery. Together they make a compact, legible record of how a well-off medical family lived and worked in the 1930s.

Okada: Birthplace of Chita Cotton

The compound sits inside one of Aichi's most atmospheric old quarters. Okada calls itself the birthplace of Chita cotton (Chita momen), a plain-woven cloth produced across the peninsula for some four centuries, from the Edo period until the postwar decades. The trade made the town, and its gently curving main street still runs past black board fences, earthen walls, storehouses, and stretches of namako walling, a lattice of raised white plaster joints over dark tiles.

Several neighbors share the storehouse's registered status. The sky-blue Chita Okada Simple Post Office, built in 1902, is among the oldest post office buildings still in service in the prefecture. The weaving venues Momengura Chita and Tsumonoki let visitors try the loom for themselves. The former Nakashichi cotton store now sells Chita cotton goods, and the former home of Takeuchi Torao recalls the inventor who patented a power loom here in 1898. A short stroll links most of them.

The district lies inland on the Chita Peninsula south of Nagoya. The usual approach is by Meitetsu train to Asakura Station, then a Chita bus toward Okada, alighting near Daimon-mae. Drivers reach it in roughly ten minutes from the Agui interchange on the Chita Hantō toll road. A preservation society runs a small office at Momengura Chita and can point you to whatever is open on the day.