Oga Family Residence Main House

What the Oga Family Residence Main House is

The Oga Family Residence Main House (大賀家住宅主屋, Ōga-ke Jūtaku Shuoku) is a late Edo period merchant dwelling at Imabō in Kita-ku, Okayama City, and it was listed as a Registered Tangible Cultural Property on June 25, 2002. The building is timber-framed, rises 2 storeys under a tiled roof, and covers 204 square metres of ground.

It sits on low ground west of central Okayama, near the point where the Sasagase and Ashimori rivers meet, and faces south. The Oga family traded tatami facing mats directly with Edo, the city we now call Tokyo, and by the closing years of the shogunate the household had been granted the right to a surname and a sword, a privilege normally reserved for samurai.

Nine buildings on this property were registered on the same day. Behind the front gate stand a detached reception room, a second-floor tatami room, storehouses, barns and work sheds, with the Oga Family Residence Main House at the centre of the group.

A 6-room plan, and why it was registered

The interior follows a 6-room plan with a narrow Doma, the earthen-floored strip that runs through most traditional Japanese houses. Farmhouses of the same period give the doma a large share of the footprint because threshing and other work happened indoors. Here the balance is reversed. The mat trade was handled at the rear of the compound, beside the canal, so the main block could be given over almost entirely to living and to receiving people.

The formal rooms carry a Tokonoma alcove, staggered shelves and a Tsukeshoin writing bay. These are the fittings of Shoin-zukuri, the reception style developed for the warrior class, and finding them in a merchant house says something about how the Oga family saw its own standing.

Japan's registration system, introduced in 1996, works by listing rather than by designation, and each entry is matched to one of three criteria. This building was listed under the criterion covering structures that contribute to the historic landscape of the country. The judgement rests on the compound as a whole rather than on any single unusual detail.

Reading the roof and the gable

The roof announces the house before anything else does. It is Irimoya-zukuri, the hipped-and-gabled form, laid in Hongawarabuki tiling of alternating round and flat tiles, and a small smoke vent rides the ridge. That vent drew smoke from the kitchen hearth, and a house needed a certain size before one was worth building.

Pent roofs wrap the south and west elevations, the two sides that take the sun and the weather. Stand in front and the eaves read as two stacked lines rather than one.

The gable is finished in Namako-kabe. Flat tiles are pinned to the wall and the joints between them are piped up in Shikkui lime plaster in rounded ridges, leaving a white lattice floating under the dark roof. Visitors who have walked the Bikan quarter in nearby Kurashiki will recognise the technique from its storehouses. Seeing it on the gable of a dwelling, as at the Oga Family Residence Main House, is less common.

At 204 square metres this is the largest of the 9 registered buildings on the property.

Visiting the Oga Family Residence Main House

The Oga Family Residence Main House is a private home and the interior is closed. The Okayama Prefectural Board of Education records its public access status as not open, and there is no reservation system, no open day and no guided visit.

What can be seen is the exterior. A lane follows the canal along the east side of the compound, and from there the front gate and the roofs behind it come into view. Do not enter the grounds, reach a camera over the wall, or look through the gate into the garden.

Photography is fine from the public road. People live here, so keep residents and their vehicles out of the frame.

For access, take an Okaden bus from the east exit of JR Okayama Station and get off at Polytech Center Okayama-mae, a ride of about 23 minutes, then walk about 8 minutes. Niwase Station on the JR Sanyo Line is about 2.6 kilometres away, roughly 35 minutes on foot or 7 minutes by taxi. There is no visitor parking nearby.