Ohashi Family Residence (Achi, Kurashiki City, Okayama)

A Kurashiki merchant house that hides behind its gate

The Ohashi Family Residence is a late Edo-period merchant house in Achi, Kurashiki City, Okayama Prefecture, whose four buildings were designated an Important Cultural Property on January 21, 1978 (Shōwa 53). In Japanese it is written 大橋家住宅 and read Ōhashi-ke Jūtaku.

The Ohashi family made its money in ground that did not exist a century earlier. Through the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries the shallow inlets around Kurashiki were diked and drained into salt pans and new rice fields, and the families who financed that work became the town's largest landowners. The Ohashi were among them, and they lent money as well. Together with the Ōhara family they formed the group of newer wealth that Kurashiki called the shinroku.

Dated timbers and a household construction record fix the building campaign closely. The Main House went up in 1796, the rice storehouse in 1799, and the front gate and inner storehouse somewhere between those two dates. Two later rebuilding campaigns, in 1807 and in 1851, reshaped the interior and added rooms.

Why the Ohashi Family Residence is an Important Cultural Property

Most Machiya in Kurashiki present their front room straight to the street. The Ohashi Family Residence does not. A two-storey Nagayamon takes the street frontage, and the Main House sits behind it across a front garden. Kurashiki City records this arrangement as unique in the town, and it is the reason the property was designated rather than simply admired.

The designation of January 21, 1978 covers four structures: the Main House, the Front Gate, the Rice Storehouse and the Inner Storehouse. A study, two roofed walls and a single volume of household building accounts called the Fushin Oboe are listed as attached items, and the house plot itself was added to the designation on June 11, 1982.

The Main House is roofed in Hongawarabuki over a low upper storey of the Tsushi-nikai type, with Kurashiki lattice across the ground floor and the barred Kurashiki window above. The Rice Storehouse and the Inner Storehouse are both Dozo-zukuri, their lower walls faced in the diamond-patterned Namako-kabe that Kurashiki uses more than any other town in the region. Both storehouses are two storeys under a Kirizuma-zukuri roof.

What to look for on a visit

Start at the gate. The Front Gate of the Ohashi Family Residence runs 11.4 metres along the street and 6.7 metres deep, a two-storey range with living space built into it, and the entrance cut through the middle of that range is what makes it a nagayamon rather than an ordinary gate. Stand in the opening for a moment before walking through. The framed view of the Main House across the garden is the effect the builders were after.

Inside, the plan opens into the earth-floored Doma and the long service passage, the Toriniwa, that runs from front to back. The living wing measures 13.4 metres across the front by 19.2 metres deep, its roof worked into a T-shape with hipped-and-gabled ends at the sides and a plain gable at the rear. A reception wing of 4.8 by 6.6 metres and a later reception wing of 12.8 by 8.8 metres extend the house eastward. Small enclosed courtyard gardens, the tsuboniwa, are cut into the plan to bring light and moving air into rooms that have no outside wall.

The house you walk through is not quite the house of 1796. Between 1991 and 1995 the buildings were taken fully apart and put back together over three years and four months, and the restorers chose to return the compound to its 1851 condition, the point at which the layout was most complete. Timbers carrying ink inscriptions were recorded during that work, which is how the construction dates are known so precisely.

The Inner Storehouse is the smallest of the four at 8.1 by 5.0 metres, the Rice Storehouse the larger at 10.9 by 5.9 metres. Look at where the plaster meets the tile on their walls. The flat tiles are bedded in thick lime mortar with the joints raised into ridges, a treatment that began as weatherproofing and ended as decoration.

Visiting the Ohashi Family Residence

The house is open to the public and charges admission. Kurashiki City lists the hours as 9:00 a.m. to 5:00 p.m., with adults paying 550 yen and elementary and junior high school students 350 yen. From March to November there are no closing days. From December to February the house closes on Fridays, opening instead when a public holiday falls on that day, and it also closes from December 28 to January 3.

Getting there is easy on foot. The Ohashi Family Residence is about a 10-minute walk from JR Kurashiki Station, at 21-31 Achi 3-chome, on the northern edge of the old merchant quarter. There is no dedicated car park, so drivers use the paid car parks that serve the district. The telephone number for enquiries is 086-422-0007.

Photography rules are not published on any official page, so ask at the reception desk when you pay. Visitors remove their shoes to go up into the rooms, which means a floor-level view of the courtyard gardens that photographs from outside never show. Allow around half an hour if you only want to see the buildings, longer if you read the displays set up in the Rice Storehouse.