Sueyoshi Family Residence (Kitadaito)

What is the Sueyoshi Family Residence on Kitadaito?

The Sueyoshi Family Residence (末吉家住宅, Sueyoshi-ke Jūtaku) is an early Showa stone house compound, dating from between 1926 and 1945, at 41 Aza-Minato in Kitadaito Village, Okinawa Prefecture, whose main house and stone wall were registered as Registered Tangible Cultural Properties of Japan on July 31, 2007.

The name needs a short note. Another registered property called the Sueyoshi Family Residence stands in Hirano Ward, Osaka, and has nothing to do with this one. To keep the two apart, this site adds the village name to the Kitadaito property.

Kitadaito Island (Kitadaitō-jima) lies in the open Pacific, roughly 360 kilometers east of Okinawa Island. The Sueyoshi Family Residence occupies a corner plot in the island's northwest, on the main road that runs down to West Port (Nishi-kō). The owner field in the Agency for Cultural Affairs database is blank; Okinawa Prefecture's list of cultural properties, current as of May 1, 2025, records the owner as a private individual.

A phosphate port and one of the island's first residential quarters

To make sense of the Sueyoshi Family Residence, start with phosphate. From 1919 to 1950, Kitadaito was mined for phosphate rock, a raw material for chemical fertilizer. Toyo Sugar began the operation, and from 1927 Dai Nippon Sugar ran it.

A light railway carried ore from the diggings to West Port, where storage bunkers, a fired drying plant and loading facilities for ships stood near the water. Shipments peaked in 1942 at over 70,000 tons, according to the Agency for Cultural Affairs.

The Agency describes the main house of the Sueyoshi Family Residence as a survivor of the earliest residential development on the island. Kitadaito Village notes that after the mine closed, most of the plant and the company housing district were lost or fell into ruin. What remains at the Sueyoshi property is a house and its boundary wall, still together on a plot along the road to the port.

The two registered structures of the Sueyoshi Family Residence

• Main house (registration no. 47-0050): early Showa period. One-story stone house with a sheet-metal roof and a building area of 107 square meters
• Stone wall (registration no. 47-0051): early Showa period. Stone construction running 69 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.

Sources differ on how to read the term for the main house. The Agency gives shuoku, while the prefectural list gives omoya. This site follows the Agency.

How the Sueyoshi compound is laid out

The plot is close to a rectangle and sits on a corner of the main road. The wall follows its west and south edges, and the main house faces the road. Both the walls of the house and the boundary wall are built of limestone, so house and enclosure are made from the same island stone.

The main house has its corners hardened with concrete and its walls laid in courses of limestone, a method known as Nunozumi. The Agency records exactly the same combination at the nearby Former Toyo Sugar Kitadaito Branch Office, the headquarters of the phosphate business. Seeing the company's building technique repeated in a private home is one of the more telling details at the Sueyoshi Family Residence.

In October 2018 the landscape shaped by the island's phosphate mining was selected as an Important Cultural Landscape under the name Cultural Landscape Derived from the Phosphate Mine on Kitadaito Island, the first such selection in Okinawa Prefecture.

Getting to the Sueyoshi Family Residence and what you can see

Kitadaito is reached by air or by sea. According to Kitadaito Village (checked October 2026), Ryukyu Air Commuter (RAC) flies one round trip a day from Naha Airport, routed via Minamidaito on Tuesdays, Wednesdays and Thursdays, with extra flights from time to time. By sea, the Daito Kaiun ferry Daito sails from Tomari Port in Naha.

The village puts West Port, where the phosphate mine remains are, about 15 minutes by car from Kitadaito Airport. The Sueyoshi Family Residence stands on the main road roughly 350 meters east of the port in a straight line.

The Sueyoshi Family Residence is a private home. Neither the house nor the grounds are open, and visitors look at the wall and the outside of the house from the road. There is no official guidance on photography; please keep the household out of your pictures and do not point a camera into the plot.