Mizote Family Residence

A Farming Family's Compound in Hayashima

The Mizote Family Residence (溝手家住宅, Mizote-ke Jūtaku) is the homestead of a wealthy farming family in Hayashima, Okayama Prefecture, where ten buildings, from a thatched main house and gate of the mid-Edo period to a billiard hall of 1936, were each registered as a Registered Tangible Cultural Property in 2021.

According to Japan's Agency for Cultural Affairs, the Mizote family served as village officials from the 17th century onward. Their property covers 2,060 tsubo (about 6,800 square metres), and on it stand a house, a guest pavilion, storehouses, work sheds and a gatehouse. None of the buildings dominates the others. What makes the Mizote Family Residence worth attention is that the whole working estate survives, with additions from nearly every generation between the Edo period and the postwar years.

Hayashima was once an island in a shallow inland sea. Land reclamation joined it to the mainland, and in the Edo period the town hosted the administrative compound of the Togawa, a family of shogunal retainers. Rush grass planted on the reclaimed fields was woven into tatami facings, which became the town's best-known product. The sources consulted for this page do not say how the Mizote family was involved in that trade.

How the Estate Grew

The Agency's database and the 2020 advisory report list the ten buildings with these dates:

• Mid-Edo period: main house, No. 3 Storehouse (originally for rice), warehouse, nagayamon gate
• 1845: No. 1 Storehouse; work on the main house and an extension of No. 3 Storehouse around the same time
• 1860: addition to the main house
• 1866: Folding Screen Storehouse
• 1904: No. 2 Storehouse
• 1909: renovation of No. 3 Storehouse
• 1921: New Reception Wing, with the pickle shed thought to date from about the same year
• 1936: billiard hall
• Between 1965 and 1974: renovation of the warehouse

The main house carries two dates in the records, the mid-Edo period and work around 1845 with an addition in 1860. Published material does not say which parts belong to which phase, and the advisory report itself says only that the house is believed to go back to the mid-Edo period.

Reading the Layout

The Mizote Family Residence faces east. A nagayamon, a gatehouse with rooms built into it, opens onto the road on that side. Beyond it lies a front garden, and behind the garden, at the centre of the plot, the thatched main house. The New Reception Wing, a detached guest pavilion of the Taishō era, sits on the garden's south side.

North of the main house are the billiard hall and No. 1 Storehouse. No. 3 Storehouse stands to the northwest, with its door opening straight off the main house's earth-floored work area. No. 2 Storehouse was set a little apart from everything else near the northern edge. Along the eastern road, a small warehouse stands north of the path to the gate, and beyond it the Folding Screen Storehouse turns its gable end to the street. A narrow strip of the site juts out to the north, and the long pickle shed follows its eastern edge along a lane.

Most of the storehouses share one detail: white plaster walls with the lower band and the corners faced in namako-kabe, a grid of square tiles with raised plaster joints. The advisory report calls this a design particular to southern Okayama, and at the Mizote Family Residence it recurs on storehouses built decades apart.

Registration

All ten buildings were registered together on 4 February 2021, under consecutive numbers 33-0337 to 33-0346. The advisory report of the previous year presented the site as a wealthy farmer's compound developed over the early modern and modern periods, and valued the way gate, house and storehouses survive as a single ensemble.

Two registration criteria were applied. Nine buildings were listed for contributing to the historic landscape. The billiard hall alone was listed as a model of design, for fitting a proper Western-style interior inside a Japanese-looking exterior.

Visiting

The Mizote Family Residence is a private home and is not open to the public. No visitor programme or special opening could be found, including in Hayashima Town's tourism information and on the map of its Furō no Michi walking routes. Please do not enter the grounds.

From the road you can see the east face of the nagayamon gate, the gable of the Folding Screen Storehouse, the outer wall of the warehouse, and, from the lane to the north, the pickle shed. The main house, the New Reception Wing and the billiard hall stand inside the compound and are largely hidden. No sign restricting photography was found, but this is a lived-in house, so avoid pointing a camera through the gate or at residents.

The nearest station is Hayashima on the JR Seto-Ōhashi Line (Uno Line). The residence lies about 800 metres west of the station on the map, roughly 15 minutes on foot. The surrounding streets are narrow and there is no visitor parking.