Okinawa World Former Taba Family Residence Main Building

A House Built From a Mansion's Remains

The former Taba Residence breaks the usual Okinawan pattern, and that is exactly what makes it worth studying. It is a single-story timber house, about 15 meters along a north-south ridge and 6.8 meters deep, under a hipped roof of red tile. Along the west veranda the rooms run from south to north: first a board-floored itama, then the ichibanza and nibanza, with the earthen-floored kitchen at the north end. The eaves gallery, the amahaji, wraps the west and south faces.

Two things set the plan apart. There is an unusually wide itama, a full bay across, placed right beside the formal ichibanza. And the house has no uraza, the private back rooms that almost every traditional Okinawan home includes. Instead a corridor runs along the east side. This departure from the standard layout is thought to reflect the shape and constraints of the plot where the house was originally built.

From Shuri, and Through the War

The house was built in the late Meiji period, between 1868 and 1911, at Ishimine in Shuri, the old royal capital that is now part of Naha. Its timbers came secondhand: when an aristocratic mansion, an udun, was demolished elsewhere in Naha, the Taba family bought the salvaged material and used it to raise this house. That origin may help explain the atypical plan, since the reused frame and the particular building lot both shaped what could be built.

The house carries the marks of the twentieth century on its posts. Sword cuts left by Japanese soldiers who used the building during the war are still there. Afterward the US military stripped away some of the eaves tiles and pitched tents against it. Inside, the pillars are studded with countless nail holes beneath later decorative boarding, a quiet record of the many uses the house was put to.

It was moved to Okinawa World in 1995 and registered as a Registered Tangible Cultural Property on April 18, 2008, announced on May 7, under registration number 47-0067, recognized as "a model of its kind" in design. The register, created by a 1996 revision of the cultural properties law, protects buildings by keeping them in active use.

What to Look For

Fittingly for a house from Shuri, the Taba Residence is now a papermaking studio. Paper made from Okinawan plants such as itobashō (fiber banana) and gettō (shell ginger) is produced here, in a nod to the papermaking that once centered on the royal capital, and visitors can try the craft.

Look for the wide itama next to the ichibanza and the missing back rooms; once you have seen the more conventional houses elsewhere in the Castle Town, this one reads clearly as the exception. Then find the sword cuts and the nail-riddled pillars. Few buildings let you touch the layers of wartime and postwar Okinawa quite this directly.

The Taba Residence is one of five structures here registered together in 2008, alongside three other former houses and a stone pig-privy, each brought from a different part of the islands.