Sezaki Family Residence

A merchant's compound on the right bank of the Oda

The Sezaki Family Residence is a merchant household in Hattori, Mabicho, Kurashiki City, Okayama Prefecture, built between the mid-Meiji period and the early Showa period, whose main house and six other structures were listed as Registered Tangible Cultural Property (buildings) on 6 August 2025. The listing covers five buildings, the main house, the Shoraitei and Nyozean teahouses and the north and south storehouses, together with two structures, the front gate and the middle gate with its wall.

The compound sits on the right bank of the Oda River, close to the point where the old Sanyodo highway met the Tamashima road. Water carried the goods and the highway carried the people, and the Sezaki family traded on both. The property is still a private home. Nothing here was converted into a museum.

All seven entries were listed on the same day, but for two different reasons. The main house and the two teahouses qualified as models of design, while the storehouses, the front gate and the middle gate with its wall qualified for their contribution to the historic landscape. The first group was judged on the rooms inside, the second on the outline the compound presents to the street and the river.

From shipping agents to a family of tea

According to Kurashiki City, Sezaki Seijiro, the third head of the family, ran the shipping agency Kojimaya while also dealing in raw cotton, brewing sake and working as a money changer, and it was he who established the household on this site. The Agency for Cultural Affairs database, describing the main house, mentions shipping together with silk reeling rather than cotton. The two accounts agree on the essential point: the family never depended on a single trade.

The height of the ground under the buildings is the work of a flood. The earlier house stood on low land beside the present site until it was damaged by the flood of 1893, after which the fourth head of the family, Sezaki Uzaemon, raised an embankment and moved the household onto it. The main house was set on the made ground, the storehouses lined up along the eastern edge, and the gates opened to the south. For a merchant family living this close to a river, the layout was a survival strategy as much as a matter of taste.

Sezaki Toshio, the fifth head, was a devoted follower of the tea ceremony. He remodelled the Shoraitei into a tearoom and built the Nyozean, which is why a working merchant compound now holds two tearooms of very different scale.

The river has not finished with the place. In July 2018 the levees of the Oda and its tributaries failed during a period of extreme rainfall, and roughly 1,200 hectares of the Mabi district went under water. The Agency for Cultural Affairs record notes repairs carried out in 2021 to the main house, the Shoraitei and the north storehouse. About 130 years after the family moved to higher ground, the same river tested the decision again.

How the compound is arranged

The main house stands at the centre of the site facing south, with a Shikidai entrance step at the middle of its front. East of it, along the eastern boundary, the north and south storehouses run in a line from north to south. The two are joined, so from the levee they read as a single long wall of plaster and board.

South of the main house, at the far edge of the site, is the Shoraitei, with the front gate immediately to its east. Two routes separate here: one leads north to the main house, the other turns west towards the garden through the middle gate. The wall that bends away from that gate defines the western side of the compound, and beyond it, against the western boundary, sits the small thatched Nyozean.

Function follows position. Reception rooms and gates to the south, working storehouses to the east, teahouses on the garden side to the west and south. The fact that the whole site can be read as a single plan is part of why all seven entries were listed together.

Visiting

The Sezaki Family Residence is privately owned and is not open to visitors. The grounds cannot be entered and the interiors of the main house and the teahouses are not normally shown. Anyone who wants to see the exterior should do so from the public road or the river levee, quietly, and should keep photography to what is visible from outside the property, without residents or daily life in the frame.

Japan's registration system was designed for buildings that stay in use by their owners, and it places no obligation on them to admit the public. Local groups occasionally arrange visits: press reports describe a residents' group running the first tearoom tour here in 2025. The Cultural Property Protection Division of the Kurashiki City Board of Education (telephone 086-426-3851) is the place to ask whether anything is planned.

The site lies in the western part of Kurashiki City. By rail, Bitchu-Kurese Station and Kibi-no-Makibi Station on the Ibara Railway Ibara Line are each about 1.5 kilometres away, a walk of 20 to 25 minutes. The Ibara Line connects with the JR Hakubi Line at Kiyone and Soja, and from Kurashiki Station the simplest route is to change at Kiyone. Drivers leave the Sanyo Expressway at the Tamashima interchange and head north, though there is no visitor parking at the house. Roads along the Oda River change with flood control work, so follow the signs on site.