Chishinkan

What Chishinkan Is

Chishinkan (知新館) is a samurai-style residence in Minamishinza, Tsuyama City, Okayama Prefecture, built in 1937 as a re-creation of the birthplace of Hiranuma Kiichirō, Japan's 35th prime minister, and its main house, front gate, wall and storehouse were registered together as Registered Tangible Cultural Properties in 1998.

The property sits southwest of the Tsuyama Castle ruins, in Minamishinza, a district that housed retainers of the Tsuyama domain. Seen from the street, it reads as a single compound: a tiled wall with a board-clad base, a modest gate set into it, a two-storey storehouse standing at the roadside, and behind them a single-storey house whose ridgelines step down at different heights.

Older maps and guidebooks may list it as the Former Hiranuma Kiichirō Villa (旧平沼騏一郎別邸), or as the Tsuyama City Local History Museum, the role it played for several decades. The present name, Chishinkan, dates from 1989.

A Birthplace Rebuilt, Then Handed to the City

Hiranuma Kiichirō was born in 1867 into a family of Tsuyama domain samurai. He and his elder brother Hiranuma Yoshirō, who later became president of Waseda University, spent their early childhood on this plot before the family moved to Tokyo in 1872.

What stands at Chishinkan today is not the house the brothers knew. To mark Kiichirō's seventieth birthday, members of the legal profession and people from Tsuyama bought back the family land and rebuilt the old residence on its original lines, with work running through 1937 and into 1938, and presented it to him as a villa. The design is credited to Nakagawa Ihei, a Tsuyama architect related to the Hiranuma family, and construction to Matsui Tadashi of the Asakuraya line of master carpenters. Kiichirō is said to have been fond of the place and to have stayed here on visits home.

In 1950 the Hiranuma family gave the villa to Tsuyama City for public use. The city opened it in 1951 as the municipal Local History Museum, which displayed historical material from the Tsuyama area until the museum closed in 1987. From 1989 the buildings took on a new role as rooms for flower arranging, tea ceremony and traditional music lessons, as well as neighbourhood meetings, and were renamed Chishinkan.

In October 1998 all four structures were entered on the national register as a Registered Tangible Cultural Property. Each was registered under the same criterion: a building that contributes to the historic landscape of the country.

Layout of the Chishinkan Grounds

The Chishinkan site meets the street along its north side. A roofed wall 26.3 metres long lines the road, and the front gate, a simple bracket-armed gate of the kind called udegimon, opens roughly halfway along it. The gate sits slightly below street level, and visitors approach it across a short stone-bridge-like entry.

Directly beyond the gate is the entrance to the main house, with the raised step and board platform known as a Shikidai that marked the formal entry of a samurai home. The main house is a single-storey timber building with a gabled roof (Kirizuma-zukuri); its reception rooms, kitchen and entrance sit under ridges set at different heights. There are gardens to the north and south of the house, and a veranda on the south side looks over the southern garden. A middle gate and a well also survive on the grounds.

The two-storey storehouse stands at the roadside, and the lower part of its outer wall is finished to match the wall and house. Even without going inside, a walk along the street shows how the wall, gate and storehouse of Chishinkan line up as one frontage.

A natural route is to look along the street frontage first, pause at the gate to see how it joins the wall, then step through to the entrance platform of the main house and end at the southern garden. The individual building pages cover each structure in more detail.

Visiting Chishinkan and Getting There

Chishinkan is still used for local cultural activities, so visits are by reservation. According to the Tsuyama City Tourism Association, tours are arranged on weekdays only and must be booked at least 5 days in advance; no visits are accepted between December 28 and January 4. Admission is free. Bookings and enquiries go to the Tsuyama City Culture Division (tel. 0868-32-7000).

Without a booking, the street-side wall, gate and storehouse can still be seen from the public road. The gate is usually closed, so plan on entering the grounds only as part of a reserved visit.

Chishinkan is about a 20-minute walk from JR Tsuyama Station. By car, allow about 15 minutes from the Innoshō interchange on the Chūgoku Expressway. The site lies southwest of the Tsuyama Castle ruins, and it helps to check the route on a map if you are combining the two on foot.