Mizote Family Residence Billiard Hall

A Western Games Room in Japanese Dress

Mizote Family Residence Billiard Hall (溝手家住宅ビリヤード場, Mizote-ke Jūtaku Biriyādo-jō) is a small Western-style games room built in 1936 on a wealthy farming family's estate in Hayashima, Okayama Prefecture, and registered as a Registered Tangible Cultural Property in 2021.

It sits north of the thatched main house, between it and No. 1 Storehouse: a single-storey timber building with a tiled roof and a footprint of 40 square metres. On an estate whose core goes back to the Edo period, this is the family's early Shōwa indulgence.

Why It Was Registered

Nine of the ten Mizote buildings were registered for their contribution to the historic landscape. The Mizote Family Residence Billiard Hall, number 33-0339, is the only one registered under a different criterion, as a model of design.

The Agency for Cultural Affairs calls it a small Western-style building with a finely finished interior, and the advisory report notes the contrast between its Japanese exterior and its thoroughly Western fittings. It was listed on its own merits, not as a piece of the streetscape.

What to Look For

Outside, it gives little away: plastered walls with a lower band of vertical boards, like any other outbuilding on the estate.

An anteroom on the east has a door on its south side and a bay window in the east gable. The main room is where the building changes character. The floor is parquet, the walls are papered above wooden wainscot panels, and a moulded cornice runs around a plaster ceiling.

On the west wall of the main room, a cue rack and a scoreboard are built in. Those fixtures are the clearest sign that the Mizote Family Residence Billiard Hall was designed around the game itself, not simply fitted out as a Western parlour.

Visiting

The Mizote Family Residence Billiard Hall stands inside the compound, north of the main house, and cannot be seen from the road. It is part of a private home and the interior is closed.

The parquet floor and scoreboard cannot be viewed from outside, so the Agency's description remains the main record of the Mizote Family Residence Billiard Hall.