Mandai Family Residence Main House

What the Mandai Family Residence Main House Is

The Mandai Family Residence Main House is a house built in 1872 in Hara, Wake Town, Okayama Prefecture, and was registered as a national Registered Tangible Cultural Property on July 8, 1999.

In Japanese the building is called Mandai-ke Jūtaku Shuoku (万代家住宅主屋). It is the house where Mandai Kaheiji was born; he went on to serve as head of his home village of 石生 (now part of Wake Town), as a member of the Okayama Prefectural Assembly, and as a member of the House of Representatives. That family history is what people in Wake usually mention first, but the Agency for Cultural Affairs registered the Mandai residence for the shape of its roof.

On paper it is a single-storey timber house with a tiled roof and a footprint of 194 square meters. In practice there is a low upper floor tucked under the roof, the kind of attic storey called Tsushi-nikai. Okayama Prefecture gives the plan as nine and a half ken by five and a half ken (a ken is the traditional bay of roughly 1.8 meters) and notes that the upper level is covered by its own Irimoya-zukuri hip-and-gable roof.

Why the Mandai Family Residence Main House Was Registered

The registration criterion cited for the Mandai Family Residence Main House is that it "serves as a model of form," and its registration number is 33-0030. Registration was announced in the official gazette on July 21, 1999.

The roof is built in two tiers. Below the upper roof, the wall of the attic storey is finished in Namako-kabe, the white-on-dark grid of plaster joints that protects the wall from rain. The lower roof is a deep Hisashi whose eaves rest on a single thick log rather than on sawn timber. Both habits are common in houses of this area. The point the agency makes is that the Mandai house is a comparatively early dated example of them, which makes it a useful reference for when the local type took shape.

Details to Look For

Photographs published by Wake Town show a white-walled front with a sliding entrance door at the center, and above the low ground-floor roof a second, hipped-and-gabled roof sitting over the attic level. From a distance the house reads as a single-storey building with one more roof stacked on top, which is exactly how a tsushi-nikai house is meant to look. The namako-kabe band gives the Mandai house its crisp black-and-white stripe.

Wake Town also points to the roof frame, assembled from logs shaped with a chōna adze and jointed together in a complicated web, as evidence of a high level of carpentry. Like the log that carries the eaves, these members keep the natural curve of the tree.

According to the prefecture, the front of the house centers on a six-mat entrance room with a raised Shikidai step, next to a ten-mat formal room with an alcove one and a half ken wide and a side alcove of one ken. The rear holds a storeroom, a Buddhist altar room and a living room in a row of four rooms. The formal front rooms suit a family that produced a village head and a member of the national parliament.

Visiting the Mandai Family Residence Main House

The Mandai Family Residence Main House is a private home and is not open to the public. Okayama Prefecture lists it as not open, and Wake Town marks it as not available for visits. No interior viewings or special openings have been announced.

On a map, Hara lies about 1.5 kilometers west of JR Wake Station on the San'yō Main Line in a straight line. There are no official directions, parking or photography guidelines. If you pass by, stay off the property and private lanes and keep in mind that people live here. Photographs of the house can be seen on the Wake Town and Cultural Heritage Online pages listed below.