Oga Family Residence Detached Reception Room

A room built for looking at a garden

The Oga Family Residence Detached Reception Room (大賀家住宅離座敷, Ōga-ke Jūtaku Hanare-zashiki) is an early Meiji period reception building at Imabō in Kita-ku, Okayama City, listed as a Registered Tangible Cultural Property on June 25, 2002. It is single-storey, timber-framed, roofed in tile, and covers 75 square metres. A corridor links it to the west side of the main house.

The Oga family traded tatami facing mats directly with Edo. Of the 9 registered buildings standing on their property, this is the one with no commercial function at all. It exists to receive guests and to look at a garden.

That garden lies to the south and is said to have been moved here from a villa of the Niwase domain. The 8-mat Zashiki, the formal tatami room at the heart of the Oga Family Residence Detached Reception Room, faces it squarely.

Sukiya taste, and the criterion behind the listing

The room is finished in the manner of Sukiya-zukuri, the style that carried the habits of the tea room into domestic architecture. Posts keep their softened edges, ceiling battens are slender, and members are chosen for grain rather than for bulk. Where the warrior-class Shoin-zukuri reception style sets out to impress, sukiya thins its dimensions down until the room feels weightless.

Even so, the fixed furnishings are anything but casual. The Tokonoma alcove, the shelving and the Tsukeshoin writing bay are carefully made, and the Agency for Cultural Affairs singles out their quality in its own account of the building.

Japan's register, created in 1996, matches each entry to one of three criteria. Most of the Oga buildings qualify through their contribution to the historic landscape. This one qualifies as a model of design. Only 3 of the 9 buildings on the property carry that criterion: this reception room, the second-floor tatami room and the inner storehouse.

Roof, eaves and the corner nobody expects

The ridge runs north to south under an Irimoya-zukuri hipped-and-gabled roof laid in Hongawarabuki, the heavy tiling of alternating round and flat units. Pent roofs on the east and south are covered in Sangawara-buki pantiles instead. Within a single compound the builders sorted their tiles by task, giving the weight to the main roof and the lighter product to the eaves.

A bath and a lavatory occupy the southwest corner. Plumbing attached to a guest room means overnight guests, and a house shipping mats to Edo would have had visitors arriving from a long way off.

At 75 square metres this is the second largest of the registered buildings here, after the main house at 204 square metres. As detached quarters go, that is generous.

Visiting the Oga Family Residence Detached Reception Room

Neither the room nor the garden south of it can be seen by any ordinary arrangement. The compound is a private home and the Okayama Prefectural Board of Education lists its public access as closed. No dated opening has been announced.

Standing behind the main house as it does, the building offers only a length of roof to anyone outside. The canal lane on the east side shows mainly the front gate and the roofs that face the road.

Photograph from public ground only. Aiming a lens over the wall into the garden is an intrusion on the household, whatever the light happens to be doing.

Buses leave the east exit of JR Okayama Station and reach Polytech Center Okayama-mae in roughly 23 minutes, with about 8 minutes of walking after that. By rail the nearest station is Niwase on the JR Sanyo Line, but the 2.6 kilometres take about 35 minutes on foot, or 7 by taxi. No parking is provided.