Sato Family Main House

Sato Family Residence Main House: a farmhouse built on land reclaimed from the sea

The ground under this farmhouse did not exist three centuries ago. The plain of Koshinden, in the Fukuda district of southern Kurashiki, was tidal flat at the mouth of the Takahashi River until the 1720s, when the sediment that had built up there was diked, drained, and turned into rice fields. Construction of the reclamation began in 1723 and finished the following year, opening up roughly two hundred hectares of new farmland. The Sato Family Residence grew on that made ground, and its main house, the shu-oku, is the centre of the compound.

The building is dated to the middle Edo period, with a documented enlargement around 1858. It sits at the heart of the site and faces south, a single-storey structure beneath a thatched hip-and-gable roof. At present the thatch carries a temporary sheet-metal cover, a common protective measure while a roof awaits re-thatching. A tiled lean-to skirt runs around all four sides, and a separate reception wing projects from the rear, at the western end.

Why it was registered

In March 2019 the main house was entered in the national register of Tangible Cultural Properties, together with the gate and two storehouses that share the site. Registration is a lighter form of protection than the Important Cultural Property or National Treasure designations. It was created to safeguard a wide range of buildings that give shape to the country's everyday historic landscape, and it leaves them in ordinary use rather than freezing them as monuments.

Among the three criteria used for registration, the main house qualified under the first and most demanding one, applied to buildings considered a model of their kind. What it models is the farmhouse plan of the Bizen plain: an earthen-floored work space on the east side, living rooms arranged in two rows on the west, and the formal room placed at the back of the front row. For a region whose old houses are steadily disappearing, an example this complete is uncommon.

What to notice

From the south the plan can be read in the silhouette. The high thatched ridge marks the core of the dwelling; the lower tiled skirt that wraps the walls protects them from rain driven across an open plain that has no hills to slow the wind. The reception wing at the back announces a household with the means to keep a room set aside for guests, the mark of a leading farming family rather than a smallholder.

It is worth remembering what kind of family farmed here. Reclaimed land had to be cleared, drained of salt, and coaxed into yielding rice over several seasons. A house of this scale, on ground only a few generations old, speaks to the prosperity that careful management of new fields could bring.

One point for visitors: this is a private residence, still owned and lived in, and it is not open to the public. The compound can be appreciated from the surrounding roads, with respect for the privacy of the people who live there. For the wider story of how this landscape was made, the nearby Kurashiki City Fukuda Museum of History and Folklore sets out the reclamation in detail and is open to all.