Former Inukai Family Residence (Kawairi, Okayama City, Okayama Prefecture)

What the Former Inukai Family Residence Is

Former Inukai Family Residence (Kawairi, Okayama City, Okayama Prefecture), 旧犬養家住宅, is a farmhouse and storehouse in Kawairi in the north ward of Okayama City, built in the middle of the Edo period and designated an Important Cultural Property on January 21, 1978. The designation covers two buildings, the main house and the storehouse, with one house-fortune diagram attached to it.

The Inukai family held office here across generations as ogashoya, the headman set over a group of villages, and as district magistrates. Family tradition holds that they were at one point raised to samurai rank under the Niwase domain. The scale of the house follows from that position rather than from farming income alone.

Inukai Tsuyoshi, better known by his pen name Bokudo, was born in this house in 1855 as the second son of the family. He was elected to the first House of Representatives and returned repeatedly afterwards, became the 29th prime minister of Japan in December 1931, and was shot dead by young naval officers at the official residence on May 15 the following year. Visitors come to the Former Inukai Family Residence for the architecture and for that biography in roughly equal measure.

Why the Designation Was Made

Roof tiles decided it. Farmhouses of this period were normally thatched or shingled, because Hongawarabuki roofing in heavy clay tile was expensive and demanded a frame stout enough to carry it. The main house of the Former Inukai Family Residence is tiled throughout, and the Agency for Cultural Affairs describes it as one of the few surviving farmhouse examples roofed this way, and one of good quality.

The main house measures 17.9 meters along the ridge and 11.0 meters across, with a Kirizuma-zukuri roof and eaves extended on the south, east and west faces, plus a projection to the north. Inside, six rooms are laid out in two rows of three. The south row holds the formal Zashiki, a middle room and an upper room; the north row holds the Nando, a second room and the kitchen. North of the Nando is an antechamber that opens into the storehouse.

The storehouse is Dozo-zukuri construction, 8.9 meters by 5.0 meters, two storeys under a tiled kirizuma roof. It is divided in use: a boarded inner store on the south side, an outer store on the north.

Around the living rooms the roof steps down one level into a shikoro finish, a skirt of tiling below the main slope, and an Engawa veranda runs along the outside. The change of roof height is easy to miss from the front and is worth walking around the building to see.

What You Are Actually Looking At

The house you see is a restoration, and the honesty of that word matters. By the 20th century the building had been altered from its original plan. The Inukai family gave it to Okayama Prefecture in 1976, and the contractor Ohmoto Gumi carried out the dismantling and repair without charge as a project marking its 70th year in business.

The team worked from two kinds of evidence: the scars left by removed pillars and beams in the surviving timber, and a house-fortune diagram drawn in the 19th century, the same document that is listed with the designation. Reading them together, they returned the Former Inukai Family Residence to the form it took in the Shotoku era, between 1711 and 1716, when the fourth head of the house, Genzaemon, rebuilt it.

So the building is a considered reconstruction of an early 18th century state, not an untouched survival, and the diagram in the display cases next door is part of the reasoning behind it. Knowing that changes how the interior reads. The heavy beams over the Doma and the composure of the individual rooms are the qualities that identify a village headman's house, and they are the qualities the repair set out to recover.

A small stream separates the house from the memorial museum. On the house side stands the Bokudo Juku hall, built to recall the story that Bokudo taught reading and writing in a room by the gate after his father died.

Visiting the Former Inukai Family Residence

The Former Inukai Family Residence is open as one of the two visitor buildings of the Inukai Bokudo Memorial Museum, which Okayama Prefecture established on the neighbouring plot in 1993. Admission is free, including special exhibitions. Opening hours are 9:00 a.m. to 5:00 p.m., with last entry at 4:30 p.m.

Closing days are Tuesdays, except when a public holiday falls on one, and the day after a public holiday unless that day is a Saturday or Sunday. The site also closes from December 28 to January 4. No booking is needed to look around on your own. Staff will guide a group through the exhibits and the house if you reserve two weeks ahead, and that circuit takes about an hour.

The museum asks visitors not to photograph the exhibits, and smoking is not permitted anywhere on the grounds. No rule is published for the house itself, so check at reception. The museum building is barrier free, but the Former Inukai Family Residence has steps and level changes, which is worth knowing before you arrive with a wheelchair or a pushchair.

From JR Niwase Station on the Sanyo Line the site is about 5 minutes by taxi, or about 25 minutes on foot over roughly 2 km. Buses from stop 5 at the east exit of Okayama Station bound for Nakasho Station and Kurashiki Station stop at Niwase Honmachi, about 15 minutes and roughly 1 km from the site. Drivers need about 20 minutes from the Soja interchange, about 25 minutes from the Okayama interchange, and about 20 minutes from the Kurashiki interchange. The car park sits about 5 minutes away on foot, along a marked path called Bokudo Komichi.