Former Okuni Family Residence (Shakusho, Wake-cho, Wake-gun, Okayama)

Two thatched roofs joined by a tiled one

The Former Okuni Family Residence is a large Edo-period house compound in Shakusho, Wake Town, Okayama Prefecture, whose six buildings were designated an Important Cultural Property on July 6, 2004 (Heisei 16). The Japanese name is 旧大國家住宅, read Kyū Ōkuni-ke Jūtaku.

The compound sits on flat ground east of the Kongō River, close to the centre of Wake. It occupies a roughly square plot facing the street on its north side. The Main House stands at the front, and a line of storehouses runs west of it: the storehouse drawing room first, then the middle storehouse, the northwest storehouse and the rooster storehouse.

The family traced its descent from a warlord of the Sengoku period, Ōmori Shinshirō Michiaki, and used the surname Ōmori after settling in Wake. The house here was begun under Ōmori Mitsumoto, who lived from 1710 to 1773 and built up the family fortune in sake brewing and haulage. Later generations served as ōjōya, the district headman rank one step above a village head, and from the middle of the nineteenth century the family also worked mines. By the middle of the Meiji era all those businesses had been wound up and the household lived on its landholdings.

Why the Former Okuni Family Residence was designated

Ink inscriptions on structural posts give the dates directly. A line brushed on the south face of a second-floor post in the rooster storehouse records the spring of 1760 and names the builder's father, and that fixes the construction of the Main House. A post in the storehouse drawing room carries a note dated to 1801, written by Ōmori Mitsunobu at the age of sixteen. The middle, northwest and rooster storehouses are all dated 1808 by the same method.

The Agency for Cultural Affairs designated the property under the criterion covering buildings outstanding in regional or school character. The reasoning is that the Former Okuni Family Residence preserves the layout of a wealthy rural headman's compound as it stood in the late Edo period, with an unusual roof on the Main House and a refined Sukiya-zukuri interior in the storehouse drawing room. Six buildings are covered, together with one earthen wall as an attached item and the house plot itself.

Okayama Prefecture had already listed the Main House and the storehouse drawing room as a prefectural cultural property on March 28, 2000. The buildings and land passed to Wake Town in 2002; a general incorporated foundation named for the family holds them now.

The roof of the Former Okuni Family Residence, and what is under it

The Main House measures 18.6 metres across the front by 18.8 metres deep, close enough to a square that the plan reads as one. Its roof is the reason people travel to see the building. Two east-west ridges, each hipped and gabled and covered in Kayabuki, run parallel to one another north and south, and a tiled section crosses between them at right angles to carry a smoke vent. Seen from the ground the ridges form the shape of the character 工. Wake Town calls the form hiyoku-irimoya, and its page notes that only a handful of examples are known anywhere, among them the main hall of Kibitsu Shrine in Okayama City; the town adds that this may be the only house built that way, a claim it presents as an open question rather than a settled fact.

Inside, the eastern half of the ground floor is Doma, an earth floor running the full depth of the building, and the western half holds eight raised rooms in two rows of four. The shop room and a Zashiki face the front; the inner room, the Buddhist altar room and the kitchen lie behind them. Over the southern half of the earth floor the ceiling falls away entirely and the plastered beam frame is left in view. The northwest zashiki has a Saobuchi-tenjō; most other rooms make do with exposed joists.

The storehouse drawing room is the other set piece. It runs 14.8 by 9.8 metres, two storeys of Dozo-zukuri under a Kirizuma-zukuri roof of Hongawarabuki, with copper-sheet eaves on all four sides. The heavy plastered exterior with tiles set into it is essentially as built in 1801. The interior is not: the room on the north with its alcove and shelving, called the onari-no-ma and reserved for a visiting lord, and the Chashitsu beside it were fitted out in the late Edo period in a lighter, tea-house manner.

The three storehouses to the west vary a good deal in size. The middle storehouse is 3.9 by 3.0 metres, the northwest storehouse 4.9 by 4.0 metres, the rooster storehouse 11.8 by 5.0 metres. All are two-storey and plastered, and all use a rafter-beam roof frame rather than a trussed one. The well house at the south, 5.9 metres square, is the youngest of the six and dates to the closing decades of the Edo period. An earthen wall 8.6 metres long north of the middle and northwest storehouses is attached to the designation. A pond, a stone bridge and stone retaining walls survive within the plot.

Visiting the Former Okuni Family Residence

The house is closed. Wake Town has been running a conservation repair programme on the compound and its cultural properties page states plainly that the site cannot be visited while the work continues. There is no ticket office, no opening hours and no admission fee to quote.

What the town does instead is open the site once a year or so as a work-in-progress viewing, and those dates go up on the Wake Town website when they are fixed. Recent openings have run in two sessions across a weekend, morning and afternoon, free of charge and without booking. Visitors have been able to watch the Main House jacked up clear of its foundations and see roof tiles being sorted and re-laid, which is not something the finished building will ever show again. Anyone planning a trip around the Former Okuni Family Residence should check the town site first rather than turning up.

Photography at these open days has not been restricted in the published notices, but the town asks visitors to wear practical shoes and to contact the office in advance if wheelchair access is needed. Cars are directed to the car parks at the Wake Town central community hall or the town office, both a short walk away in Shakusho.

The address is 38 Shakusho, and the site lies about a 15-minute walk from Wake Station on the JR Sanyō Line. Wake Town notes that Okayama Station is roughly 30 minutes away by train, which makes a same-day visit from the prefectural capital straightforward when an open day is announced.