Kubura Family Residence

What is the Kubura Family Residence?

The Kubura Family Residence (久部良家住宅, Kubura-ke Jūtaku) is a Meiji-era house compound at 365 Aza-Yonaguni in Yonaguni Town, Okinawa Prefecture, whose main house and stone wall were registered as Registered Tangible Cultural Properties of Japan on October 2, 2007.

A word of warning about the name. Kubura is also the name of the fishing settlement at the far western tip of Yonaguni Island, home to Kubura Port and the Kubura Bari cliff. The Kubura Family Residence is not there. It stands in Sonai, the island's main settlement on the north coast, about 100 meters south of the Yonaguni Town Office. Anyone who drives out to Kubura village expecting to find the house will end up on the wrong side of the island.

The Agency for Cultural Affairs database leaves the owner field blank, while Okinawa Prefecture's list of cultural properties records a private individual. This is a family home, not a museum.

A house shipped from Ishigaki, a wall already in place

Tradition holds that the main house of the Kubura Family Residence was originally a building of Ishigaki Dunchi (石垣殿内), a residence in what is now Ishigaki City. The Agency dates its construction to the middle of the Meiji period and its move to Yonaguni to 1940. Ishigaki and Yonaguni are separated by open sea, so the timber house must have been taken apart and carried over by boat before being raised again here.

The stone wall around the plot is dated to the late Meiji period. Read side by side, the two dates suggest that the wall was here first, and that the main house was set down inside an existing enclosure some decades later. Official records say nothing more about why the house was moved or what Ishigaki Dunchi looked like before it left.

The two registered structures of the Kubura Family Residence

• Main house (registration no. 47-0056): built in the mid-Meiji period and moved here in 1940. One-story timber house with a tiled roof and a building area of 160 square meters
• Stone wall (registration no. 47-0057): built in the late Meiji period. Stone construction running 39 meters

Both were registered on the same day under consecutive numbers, and both under the criterion of contributing to the historic landscape of the country. In its note on the wall, the Agency says that house and wall together form a historic scene peculiar to the Okinawa region. The Kubura Family Residence makes the most sense when the two are seen as a pair.

How the Kubura Family Residence is laid out

The main house stands near the middle of the plot under a hipped tile roof. The stone wall follows the east and south edges of the property, with a gateway opening in its run. From the street, what you take in first is the pale coral limestone of the wall with the tiled roof rising behind it.

The compound sits in the part of Sonai close to the town office and Yonaguni Elementary School. Wall and roof survive together, so the outline of an old island homestead can still be read from the road.

Getting to the Kubura Family Residence

Yonaguni is reached by air or sea. According to the Yonaguni Tourism Association (information as of March 2026), Ryukyu Air Commuter operates 2 flights a day from Naha and 3 a day from Ishigaki. The Fukuyama Kaiun ferry Yonakuni links Ishigaki Port with Kubura Port, leaving Ishigaki on Mondays and Thursdays at 10:00 a.m. and arriving at around 2:00 p.m.

From Yonaguni Airport the Kubura Family Residence is about 3 kilometers by road, under 10 minutes by car. The town's community bus is free for everyone and takes about 6 minutes from the airport to the Yonaguni Town Office stop, though there are only 9 runs a day and the tourism association recommends a rental car for getting around. From the town office stop it is a 2-minute walk south.

The Kubura Family Residence is a private home: neither the house nor the grounds are open, and the property is viewed from the street. There is no official guidance on photography, but please keep the residents' daily life out of your pictures and do not lean in through the gateway.