Hisatsune Family Residence

A 1924 Estate on the Southern Edge of Nakatsu

The Hisatsune Family Residence (久恒家住宅) is a private estate in Kamimiyanaga, Nakatsu City, Oita Prefecture, built in 1924, whose 15 structures were entered on the national register as Registered Tangible Cultural Properties in 2001. The grounds form a near perfect square of about 1000 tsubo, roughly 3300 square metres.

The man who built it was Hisatsune Sadao. He made his money running coal mines and later sat in the House of Peers, the appointed upper chamber of the pre war Japanese parliament. The Agency for Cultural Affairs database mentions this career in its entry on the living quarters. Coal money is what put an estate of this scale in a belt of fields and scattered houses south of the Nakatsu town centre.

All 15 entries were registered on the same day, and their registration numbers run in an unbroken sequence from 44-0053 to 44-0067. Nine buildings are covered, and so are six works of a different kind: the main gate, the rear gate, the water tower, the chimney, the north wall and the south wall. Breaking an estate into its parts and registering each one separately is how the Japanese registration system works, since it lists structures one at a time rather than by compound. At the Hisatsune Family Residence that principle produced the figure of 15.

Only the ondol room departs from the 1924 date. It is placed at around 1945.

How the Grounds Are Put Together

The estate faces east. The main gate and the row house gate stand side by side along the eastern boundary, while the rear gate opens near the middle of the western boundary, directly opposite. Along the north side, running east to west, sit the storage shed, the ondol room and the rice storehouse, with the north wall closing the corner beyond them. The south wall wraps the southern boundary and the southern halves of the east and west sides. The north wall measures about 37 metres and the south wall about 116 metres, so between them these two walls draw almost the whole outline of the Hisatsune Family Residence.

Three principal buildings stand inside. The guest wing occupies roughly the centre of the site, the inner parlor lies to its west, and the living quarters sit towards the north east corner. Of the three storehouses, the east storehouse is north west of the living quarters, the west storehouse north west of the inner parlor, and the rice storehouse in the north west corner of the grounds. The water tower rises against the north face of the east storehouse. The chimney is wedged into the narrow gap between the projecting west side of the living quarters and the east storehouse.

Keeping that plan in mind tells you what can and cannot be seen from the street. What reads from outside is the perimeter: the main gate and row house gate on the east, the rear gate on the west, and the brick walls north and south. The guest wing and inner parlor sit behind walls and trees, and little more than roof lines shows above them.

What the 15 Registrations Recognise

The 15 entries at the Hisatsune Family Residence fall under three registration criteria. Ten qualify as contributing to the historic landscape of the nation: the main gate, guest wing, living quarters, row house gate, rice storehouse, ondol room, storage shed, rear gate, north wall and south wall. Four qualify as difficult to reproduce: the east storehouse, west storehouse, water tower and chimney. One, the inner parlor, qualifies as a model of design.

The split says plainly what each structure was valued for. The brick storehouses and utility works were judged on materials and techniques no longer easily repeated. The inner parlor, said to be the work of temple carpenters brought from Kyoto, was judged on the quality of its design. Everything else earned its place as part of a walled compound that shapes the look of the district.

One material runs through the estate and marks it out: slag brick, made by binding the residue left from smelting. The walls of the storage shed, the water tower and the chimney are all built of it, each a single brick thick. Using a by product of heavy industry on the outbuildings of a country estate points straight back to where the family fortune came from. The walls and the storage shed are laid in English bond, on foundations of dressed granite.

Visiting Conditions and Getting There

The Hisatsune Family Residence is privately owned. The list of cultural properties published by Nakatsu City records the owner as a private individual and says nothing about public opening, and the Agency for Cultural Affairs database gives no opening times or special viewing dates either. Treat the estate as a place you cannot enter, and plan on looking at it from the public road. No route into the grounds or the buildings is currently advertised.

Photography from the street raises no particular problem, but this is somebody's home. Lingering against the wall or pointing a lens through a gateway is not the way to go about it.

The site lies about 1.5 kilometres south of Nakatsu Station on the JR Nippo Line, a little over 20 minutes on foot or roughly 5 minutes by taxi. Nakatsu is a limited express stop on the line between Kokura and Oita, and is reachable from Hakata with one change at Kokura. The lanes around the estate are residential and there is no visitor parking, so leaving a car in central Nakatsu and walking is the safer plan.

Even from outside, the Hisatsune Family Residence repays the walk. Come at it from the east and the zelkova posts of the main gate and the white plaster of the row house gate line up in one view. Carry on round to the west and the rear gate appears with brick walling running away on both sides. Follow the walls the whole way round and the figure of 1000 tsubo stops being an abstraction.

Reading the Name

久恒家住宅 is read Hisatsune-ke Jūtaku. The surname is sometimes misread as Kyūkō or Hisatsugu, but the phonetic field in the Agency for Cultural Affairs database gives Hisatsune for every one of the 15 entries.

Each structure carries the estate name followed by the name of the part, so the formal titles run 久恒家住宅正門 for the main gate, 久恒家住宅奥座敷 for the inner parlor, and so on. Nakatsu City and Oita Prefecture sometimes insert a space between the two halves, but the subject is the same.