Omori Family Residence Main House

What is the Omori Family Residence Main House?

The Omori Family Residence Main House (大盛家住宅主屋, Ōmori-ke Jūtaku Shuoku) is a single-story wooden house built in 1915 in Kohama, Taketomi Town, Okinawa Prefecture, and it was registered as a Registered Tangible Cultural Property of Japan on August 3, 2006.

It covers a building area of 114 square meters. The homestead slopes down toward the south, and the Omori main house stands near the middle of the plot, facing south.

Why It Was Registered

The house was registered for its contribution to the historic landscape. A single-story house under a hipped roof of red tiles, set at the center of a yard enclosed by a stone wall and screened by a hinpun, is the kind of village scene the registration sets out to keep.

By the time of registration the Omori main house was more than 90 years old. Its red roof and orderly four-room plan were assessed together with the wall and the hinpun, as the house at the heart of the compound.

What to Look For: The Roof and the Front Rooms

The house measures 5.5 by 4.5 ken. Taking a ken as about 1.8 meters, that gives a footprint of roughly 10 by 8 meters. The roof is a Yosemune-zukuri hip roof, and the entrance is on one of the long sides parallel to the ridge, the Hirairi arrangement.

The roof is laid with Ryukyu red tiles, and the joints between them are sealed with white Shikkui lime plaster. That plaster is what draws the pale lines across the red surface. Because a hip roof slopes away on all four sides, its full spread shows even from beyond the wall.

Verandas run along the south and east sides. Inside, four rooms are arranged in a regular two-by-two grid, the plan known as Yomadori, with a wooden-floored room added on the west.

The front of the house is the part worth picturing. The two south-facing rooms, together with a tatami-floored inner veranda (Uchien) along the south side, add up to about 20 tatami mats, and according to the Agency for Cultural Affairs this space was used for community meetings. The Omori Family Residence Main House was a family home and a village gathering hall at once.

Visiting the Main House

The Omori Family Residence Main House is a private home, and its interior is not open. It can be viewed only from outside.

The stone wall around the yard stands about 1.5 to 1.7 meters high, so the red roof of the main house is visible from the lane. The south front of the house is hidden behind the hinpun just inside the gateway, and cannot be seen head-on from the road.

Please keep to photographing the exterior from the road and do not look in through the gateway.