Tokuyama Family Residence

About the Tokuyama Family Residence

The Tokuyama Family Residence (渡久山家住宅, Tokuyama-ke Jūtaku) is a homestead in Ōkawa, Ishigaki City, Okinawa Prefecture, laid out between about 1894 and the early Shōwa period, whose main house, furiya, well and stone wall were registered as four Registered Tangible Cultural Properties on 2 October 2007.

All four share the address 340 Okawa and carry consecutive registration numbers, 47-0052 to 47-0055. The main house and stone wall were registered for their contribution to the historic landscape; the furiya and well were registered as models of their type. In other words, the two front elements are valued for how they shape the street, and the two behind for how clearly they record the workings of a household.

The dates spread across three eras. The furiya and well are recorded as about 1894, the red-tiled main house as 1925, and the stone wall at the gate as early Shōwa. The stone structures at the back of the plot are roughly thirty years older than the house that now stands in front of them.

An Inland Corner of Ōkawa That Grew in the Meiji Era

The Tokuyama Family Residence stands in the inland part of Ōkawa, which Ishigaki City counts with Tonoshiro, Ishigaki and Arakawa among the four old villages (Ishigaki Shika-mura, 石垣四箇村) at the heart of the town. According to Ishigaki City, this area filled out during the Meiji era (1868 to 1912) as branch families left the established settlement and people moved in from other villages. The homestead sits within that Meiji-era spread.

The city's notes also record that the man who built the house worked at the post office. How he gathered the timber is told on the main house page.

How the Homestead Is Arranged

Read together, the descriptions by the Agency for Cultural Affairs and Ishigaki City give a fair picture of the plot. The main house stands in the middle. In front of it, at the gateway on the southern corner of the site, is the stone wall.

The well lies to the front left of the house and the furiya to the rear left; the city puts them southwest and northwest of the house respectively. The place for drawing water and washing and the place that served as both toilet and pigsty thus sit one behind the other on the same side of the house.

A furiya, in the local Yaeyama usage, is a single structure combining a toilet and a pig pen. Because the well, furiya and stone wall were registered along with the house, the Tokuyama Family Residence lets you read a Yaeyama home as a whole compound rather than as one red-roofed building.

Visiting: Access and What You Can See

The Tokuyama Family Residence is a private home, and we found no notice of any public opening. Neither the buildings nor the grounds can be entered, so a visit means looking at the exterior from the road. Please do not peer through the gateway or step onto the property.

From the road the most visible parts are the stone wall on the southern corner and the red tile roof of the main house behind it. The well and furiya stand beside and behind the house, and we have not been able to confirm how much of them can be seen from outside.

There is no railway on Ishigaki. The residence is in the town centre, about 660 metres in a straight line from the Azuma bus terminal in Misaki-chō and about 800 metres from the Ishigaki Port Remote Island Terminal, or roughly a 10 to 15 minute walk. Route buses take about 30 to 45 minutes between New Ishigaki Airport (Painushima Ishigaki Airport) and the town centre. We found no information on visitor parking.