Arakaki Family Residence (Shuri Sueyoshi, Naha City, Okinawa)

Limestone Walls and a Postwar House in Shuri

Arakaki Family Residence (新垣家住宅, Arakaki-ke Jūtaku) is a private homestead in Shuri Sueyoshi, Naha City, Okinawa, where five limestone structures from around 1896 and a main house built in 1956 were registered together as Registered Tangible Cultural Property on 31 July 2007.

The Agency for Cultural Affairs lists the six as separate entries, numbered 47-0035 to 47-0040: the main house, a hinpun screen wall, the boundary stone wall, a furu (a stone pigsty that doubled as the toilet), and two small ponds. Only one of them is a building in the everyday sense.

The name invites confusion. Down in the pottery quarter of Tsuboya, Naha has another Arakaki Family Residence, a potter's home known for its climbing kiln. That is a separate property; the one described here sits in Shuri, the hilltop district that was once the royal capital, and the Agency's database adds "Tsuboya" to the other one's name to keep them apart.

Around sixty years separate the oldest and newest parts. The stonework is dated to about 1896, less than two decades after the Ryukyu Kingdom became Okinawa Prefecture. The house dates from 1956. Shuri held the Japanese army's headquarters during the Battle of Okinawa in 1945 and was caught up in heavy fighting, but we found no record of what became of the family's prewar house.

How the Compound Is Laid Out

The homestead faces south. A stone wall 58 metres long runs along its south, west and north sides. Walk in from the road on the south and the first thing in front of you is the hinpun, a freestanding stone screen set between the road and the main house so that nobody at the entrance can look straight into the home.

The main house stands a little north of centre: a single-storey timber building under red tiles.

East of the house, pressed against the eastern edge of the plot, is the East Pond. The South Pond lies near the house's south-eastern entrance and is built into the stone paving that surrounds the house. On the west side, backed against the west wall, is the furu, a set of cut-stone pig pens that also served as the household toilet, with three arched roofs along its west face.

Boundary wall, screen, house, pig pens and ponds: the outdoor elements that shaped an Okinawan homestead all survive here on a single plot, which is what makes the Arakaki Family Residence worth knowing about.

Why the Whole Compound Was Registered

All six were registered under the same criterion, contribution to the historic landscape of the country. Read the Agency's descriptions side by side and they keep returning to the setting rather than to any one structure: the red-tiled roof of the house, and the way the screen, the wall, the furu and the ponds shape a yard that is recognisably Okinawan.

Look closely at how the stone is handled. The wall and the hinpun are Ranzumi (random-coursed) Ryukyu limestone with dressed faces, and the Agency notes that the stretch of wall leading to the hinpun entrance is finished with particular care. The furu is assembled from cut blocks of different sizes. The South Pond is ringed with natural stone and lined with lime plaster. The same limestone is worked more or less finely depending on where it stands and what it is for.

Then there is the pairing of a postwar house with Meiji-era stonework. For anyone interested in how a Shuri household plot carried on through the twentieth century, the Arakaki Family Residence offers something concrete to look at.

Visiting the Arakaki Family Residence

This is a private home owned by an individual, and neither the grounds nor the buildings are open to the public. We found no contact point for visits and no published open days.

Because the stone wall follows the boundary and the hinpun stands between the house and the road, parts of them may be visible from the street, though we have not confirmed how much. If you look from outside, stay off the property and keep residents and the inside of the grounds out of any photographs.

The address is 2-124-2 Shuri Sueyoshicho, Naha. The nearest station is Shiritsu Byoin Mae on the Okinawa Urban Monorail (Yui Rail), and the residence lies roughly 300 metres from it in a straight line. There is no information on visitor parking.