Okinawa World Former Chinen Family Residence Fool

The Stone Privy Where Pigs Were Kept

Set among the houses of the Ryukyu Kingdom Castle Town at Okinawa World is a small, low structure of stone that many visitors pass without a second glance. It is a fūru, and it belongs to one of the most distinctive traditions of old Okinawan rural life: a privy and a pigsty built as one.

The fūru is built entirely of cut Ryukyu limestone, the coral-derived stone quarried across the southern islands. Its footprint is compact, about 3.4 meters east to west and 3.5 meters north to south, with a registered area of roughly 16 square meters. The interior is divided into two compartments, each about 2.1 by 1.3 meters. Over the west compartment a low, nearly flat stone arch forms the roof, while the east front opens onto a paved stone floor. In a household, human waste dropped through an opening in the paving, known in Okinawan as the tūshinumī, and the pigs kept below consumed it. It is a frank arrangement, and it was once ordinary across the Ryukyus.

How It Worked, and Why It Ended

The details of the stonework record exactly how the fūru was used. A hole was left in the partition between the two compartments, sized so that piglets could move through while a larger pig could not; the two spaces let a household separate a sow from her young as they grew. The paved floor slopes inward, and the opening for the tūshinumī is worked into the stone. In front of it once stood a single flat stone and a low screen wall, the chirakakushi, for privacy. Waste was generally carried off along a channel and collected for use as fertilizer, and faint traces of that system survive in the stone.

The practice did not last. Around 1917, on sanitary grounds, the local police chief ordered many fūru destroyed and forbade the building of new ones. This one happened to be among those spared. About the same time, a scoop-type toilet was set up beside it, and the fūru was thereafter used only as a pigsty. A stone post in front of it was fitted around 1941 with a wooden roof, turning that corner into a rain shelter for livestock.

The fūru was built around 1897, in the late Meiji period, and originally stood at Maekawa in the old Tamagusuku district, close to where Okinawa World is today. It was moved to the park in 1996. On April 18, 2008, announced on May 7, it was entered on the national register as a Registered Tangible Cultural Property, registration number 47-0070. Unlike the houses nearby, it was listed under a different criterion: as something "not easily reproducible." The stone-arch construction and the way of life it served can no longer be recreated, and that is much of the point of preserving it.

What to Look For

Come to the fūru knowing what it is, and the stonework starts to speak. Find the piglet-sized opening in the partition, the inward slope of the paved floor, and the worked hole of the tūshinumī. These are not decorative features; they are the working parts of a vanished domestic system, and reading them is far more rewarding than glancing at a bare stone box.

The low stone arch over the west compartment is worth a moment on its own, a modest but skilled piece of Okinawan masonry cut from local limestone. Standing here, it is easy to grasp why the register singled the fūru out. A house can be rebuilt from plans; a structure like this, tied to a custom that sanitary law ended more than a century ago, cannot.

The Chinen fūru is one of five structures registered together here in 2008, alongside four former houses. It is the only non-residential piece in the group, and the one that speaks most plainly about daily life rather than architecture.