Former Inoko Family Residence Main Building

A 1934 Retirement House Above Ago Bay

The Former Inoko Family Residence Main House (旧猪子家住宅主屋, Kyū-Inoko-ke Jūtaku Shuoku) is a single-story wooden house in Ago-chō, Shima City, Mie Prefecture, completed in 1934 and entered on Japan's register of Tangible Cultural Properties on 27 March 2018. It stands on the south-facing slope of a wooded rise on the shore opposite Kashikojima, looking down over the inlets of Ago Bay.

The man who built it was Inoko Yahei (猪子彌平), born in Shikoku in 1880, who spent his working life with an insurance company and held branch-manager posts in several cities before retiring. He chose this hillside in what was then a quiet corner of the Shima Peninsula and had a house put up as a place to live out his later years. The registration file records the building area as 95 square metres; Shima City gives the precise figure of 95.2.

Ninety-five square metres is not large. What makes the house interesting is how much variety its builder packed into that footprint. The entrance porch and the kitchen wing each project forward from the main body, and each carries its own irimoya roof, the hipped-and-gabled form in which a gable sits above a skirt of hipped eaves. Seen from the approach, the roofline breaks into three overlapping planes rather than presenting a single ridge. The effect is closer to a small villa than to a farmhouse.

Two other structures on the property were registered on the same day: a dozō storehouse of 19.8 square metres and a pair of gate pillars with a three-metre span. All three date from 1934, so the property survives as a complete set rather than as an isolated building.

Japanese Rooms, a Western Study

Inside, the house divides along a line that ran through a great many Japanese homes of the 1930s but is rarely preserved this intact.

The Japanese rooms carry the full complement of zashiki-kazari, the formal display fittings of a reception room: a tokonoma alcove for a hanging scroll, and a tsuke-shoin, the built-in writing bay whose shallow desk and latticed window began in medieval temple studies and became a mark of status in domestic architecture. Above the sliding partitions runs a carved ranma transom. The Agency for Cultural Affairs entry describes its carving as pine and crane; Shima City's announcement mentions pine, bamboo and plum. Both are auspicious pairings in the Japanese decorative vocabulary, and the discrepancy between the two official descriptions has not been resolved here.

Beside the entrance is something different. The former study is a Western-style room with plastered walls, glazed doors and a gō-tenjō, a coffered ceiling of framed panels, finished in lacquer. A coffered ceiling in a Japanese building normally signals a temple hall or a room of high rank; applying one to a private study, and lacquering it, was an expensive decision. This is the room that tells you the owner had money and specific ideas about how to spend it.

The Agency for Cultural Affairs registered the house under the criterion of being a model of design (造形の規範となっているもの), the strictest of the three grounds available for registration. It is applied to buildings whose composition or detailing sets a standard, rather than to those valued mainly for their contribution to the landscape or for technical achievement.

Rescue, Repair and a Second Life

By the 2010s the house was in poor condition. In 2013 a couple, Takeuchi Kazuhiko and Takeuchi Chizuru, bought the 2,800-tsubo plot after finding it listed online, and began clearing bamboo, thinning the woodland and putting in drainage. Repairs to the main house and the storehouse followed, and the registration of 2018 came out of that work. The Cultural Council recommended the buildings in November 2017; formal registration took effect the following March, which is why some accounts date the listing to 2017.

The site now operates under the name Inocono (いのこ野), coined by the contemporary artist Murai Hironori, who reasoned that writing inoko in kana and leaving no (field, open ground) in characters would keep the connection to the Inoko family while removing any sense of a fenced-off institution.

A third building went up east of the main house between 2018 and 2021: the Ikada Maruta no Ie, a small timber house built from raft logs with the help of some eighty people, certified under Japan's climate-and-culture-adapted housing scheme and subsequently given the Chubu Architecture Award, the Mie Prefecture Architecture Award and several others. Standing among the old cedars and ubame oaks, the three buildings make an unusually direct comparison between 1934 craftsmanship and a contemporary attempt at the same problem.

Visitors should understand what this means in practice. Inocono is private property run as a creative workspace and event venue, not a museum with opening hours. Use is by written application through the operator's website, and the ground rules, guidance notes and application form are all published there. Anyone hoping to see the coffered ceiling should write ahead rather than turn up at the gate.

Getting There, and What Else Is Nearby

The house sits on the shore facing Kashikojima, the terminus of the Kintetsu Shima Line and the usual arrival point for visitors to Ago Bay. Kashikojima is roughly two and a half hours from Nagoya and about two hours twenty minutes from Osaka-Namba by limited express. From the station the site is a short drive around the head of the inlet.

Ago Bay itself is the reason most people come to this part of Mie. Its indented rias coastline, dotted with cultured-pearl rafts, was the setting for the 2016 G7 Ise-Shima Summit, held on Kashikojima. Shima City has eight registered buildings in total, and one of the others is worth pairing with a visit here: the Matsui Pearl Shop (registered 2021), a 1929 timber shopfront on Kashikojima harbour with pine motifs cut through its second-floor railing. Together the two buildings sketch what the bay looked like in the decades when pearl culture was making the region prosperous.

Photography of the exterior from public roads presents no difficulty. Photography inside, and access to the grounds generally, follow whatever terms the operator sets when an application is approved.