Kihachiya Ryokan Old Building

The First Building of Kihachiya Ryokan

The Kihachiya Ryokan Old Building (喜八屋旅館旧館) is a ryokan (Japanese inn) building of 1905 (enlarged in 1928) in Ogimachi, Sado City, Niigata Prefecture, and was registered as a Registered Tangible Cultural Property (structure) on August 3, 2006 (Agency for Cultural Affairs).

The Agency records a 5-storey timber building roofed in sheet iron, with a building area of 115 square metres; registration number 15-0201.

From Two-Storey Town House to Five-Storey Inn

According to Sado City, the Kihachiya Ryokan Old Building housed the inn when it opened. It began as a two-storey timber town house with a gabled roof of boards held down by stones and an upper floor jutting out on projecting beams. New floors were later built on top of the second-floor roof, producing the present 5-storey hipped building of 12.1 by 9.1 metres, roofed in sheet iron.

The Agency and the city date this enlargement to 1928. Sado City's townscape survey report of 2023, however, gives 1929 on the evidence of a surviving ridge tag, so the sources differ by a year.

The Agency records a living room and other rooms on the ground floor and guest rooms on the second, fourth and fifth floors. The third floor was a passage to the rooms above, and most of it still shows the roof framing of the two-storey house (Sado City). The survey report adds that the original shingle roof of the second floor survives and can be seen from the third floor.

Why It Was Registered

The Agency registered the Kihachiya Ryokan Old Building as a structure that contributes to the historic landscape of the country. Its description points to the jutting second-floor front, kept as the old facade even after the storeys above were added.

The survey report sees a large town house of 1905 overlaid by the 1929 enlargement, which reflects the growth of the inn trade. Because it keeps its original form around the void while carrying the design of a modern inn, the report calls it valuable for understanding modern Ogi.

A Three-Row Plan Found Nowhere Else in Ogi

The survey report notes that the frontage of the Old Building exceeds six ken, making it one of the largest town houses in Ogi. In 1905 the plan had three rows of rooms, two deep, with an earth-floored passage running through on the south side. The survey found this three-row plan in no other house in the town.

Later work changed the ground floor heavily, but the area around the room that corresponds to the oie, the family room of an Ogi town house, keeps its traditional form (survey report). Above it a void opens up to the original roof framing and exposed rafters, and the broad staircase and finely made railing still recall the inn. Sado City says this living room with its sunken hearth was, together with the guest rooms on the fourth and fifth floors, one of the sights of the inn.

What to Look For

Stand in the street and look up at the front of the Kihachiya Ryokan Old Building. Up to the second floor it keeps, despite later alterations, the projecting-beam construction and eave height of Ogi's town houses; above that sit three storeys that largely look as they did when they were added (survey report). The jutting second floor is the old facade, so two fronts from different decades are stacked in one elevation.

The survey report reproduces a photograph of the building on completion in 1929, held privately. Set beside the front today, it helps you judge how much of the upper storeys is original.

Visiting

The front room on the ground floor of the Kihachiya Ryokan Old Building is used as a café (survey report). The Niigata Prefectural Tourism Association lists it as Kihachiya Goro Cafe, open from 10:30 a.m. to 5:00 p.m. and closed on Mondays and Tuesdays, with other irregular closures; while it is open you can step into part of the ground floor. Check the current opening before you go.

No official information was found on access to the upper floors or the void, or on photography inside. The front can be seen from the street. Directions from Ogi Port are on the Kihachiya Ryokan page.