Nakazaki Family Main Building

The Landowner's House at Higashi-Koji

The Nakazaki Family Residence Main House (仲﨑家住宅主屋, Nakazaki-ke Jutaku Shuoku, the surname also written 仲崎 where the original character is unavailable) is a two-storey timber residence in Osafune-cho Fukuoka, Setouchi City, Okayama Prefecture, completed around 1917 and entered on Japan's Register of Tangible Cultural Properties on 2 November 2018.

It occupies the northern part of its plot and faces west onto Higashi-Koji, the broad main street of Bizen Fukuoka. Full two storeys, a hipped-and-gabled roof with a slight convex swell to the slope, and a lean-to skirt running around all four sides. Floor area is 190 square metres, which in a farming district of the late 1910s put it well above the local norm.

Setouchi City records the master carpenter as Higashihara Sanokichi and states that construction ran roughly ten years from the closing years of Meiji. The national database dates the building to about 1917. Those two statements fit together rather than conflict: work began late in the Meiji era and finished in the sixth year of Taisho.

A Plan That Sorts People

The ground floor is arranged in two ranks of three rooms, front and back. What makes the plan worth describing is the deliberate separation between them. Corridors and walls divide the public face of the house from its working interior, so that a visitor received at the front never drifts into the family's territory by accident.

That kind of division is a landowner's requirement. Tenants came to pay rent, officials came on business, neighbours came on errands, and the house needed to receive all of them without opening itself completely. The plan encodes a social structure.

Upstairs, the mixture shifts. Formal zashiki reception rooms sit alongside rooms finished in Western style, a combination that became fashionable among wealthy rural households in the Taisho years. The two idioms coexist on one floor without either being subordinated.

The joinery throughout is of high quality, inside and out. Setouchi City notes that tsuga, Japanese hemlock, was used for the columns, a timber much favoured at the time. Look at the posts if you get inside; the grain is the point.

Bizen Fukuoka, and Why the Street Is So Wide

The setting explains a good deal about the house. Bizen Fukuoka was a medieval commercial town of real consequence, a castle town under the provincial governors and their deputies through the Nanbokucho and Muromachi periods, and the site of a periodic market that a national treasure picture scroll, the Ippen Shonin Eden, depicts in vivid detail from the year 1278.

The town was also the home ground of the Kuroda family before they rose to prominence. Kuroda Takamasa, great-grandfather of the strategist Kuroda Kanbei, lies buried at Myokoji temple here. When Kanbei's son Nagamasa received a large domain in Kyushu after Sekigahara, he named his new castle town Fukuoka after this place.

Its decline came suddenly. In 1591 the Yoshii River flooded catastrophically, and the town that had been called Fukuoka Sengen for its thousand houses never recovered its former scale. The swordsmiths of the Osafune and Fukuoka Ichimonji schools, whose blades account for a large share of Japan's designated sword treasures, were scattered by the same disaster.

Walk the streets and the medieval defensive planning is still legible: house frontages set back at intervals so a person can stand concealed, streets curved just enough to break the sight line, and crossroads deliberately kept rare. The Nakazaki house sits inside that grid as its largest surviving element, which is what the registration citation means in calling it the core of the settlement's landscape.

Visiting: Check the Calendar First

The house opens to the public as Nakazaki-tei, but on scheduled days rather than continuously. The Setouchi City tourism association publishes the month's opening dates in advance, and the pattern in recent months has run to weekend mornings, typically 10:00 to 12:00 on Saturdays and Sundays, with occasional evening openings during local festivals.

Admission is 500 yen and includes a coffee or tea in the cafe. The building operates as a place to sit down in rather than merely a place to look at, which suits a house designed around receiving people.

JR Osafune Station on the Ako Line is about fifteen minutes on foot. Drivers exit the Sanyo Expressway at Sanyo IC and continue roughly twenty minutes; parking is available. Check the current month's schedule before travelling, since the opening days shift and unannounced visits will find the doors shut.

One caution on the address. The national database records the main house at 689 Higashi-Koji, Fukuoka, while the tourism listing for Nakazaki-tei gives 688 Fukuoka. The registered building is the same one; the discrepancy appears to reflect different conventions for the plot as against the visitor entrance. Follow signage in the town or use the tourism association's map.

While in the area, Myokoji temple with the Kuroda graves stands a few minutes away, the market site is marked with a stone monument, and a revived version of the medieval market runs on the fourth Sunday of each month. Four of the town's original seven communal wells survive.