Wakabayashi Family Residence

A silk entrepreneur's walled estate

The Wakabayashi Family Residence (若林家住宅, Wakabayashi-ke Jūtaku) is a walled estate of modern Japanese-style houses in Inukata-cho, Hikone, Shiga Prefecture, arranged around a main house built in 1928, and eight of its structures were registered as Registered Tangible Cultural Properties on 29 November 2016. Behind its plastered walls stand a Japanese-style main house, a small Western-style wing with a red tile roof and a chimney, a kitchen wing, a formal reception wing, a tea room and two storehouses.

The man behind it was Wakabayashi Otokichi. According to the family's own website, he was born in 1872 in the former village of Kawase, the fourth son of Wakabayashi Matasaburō. He served as village mayor and as a member of the Shiga Prefectural Assembly, and he founded the Wakabayashi silk-reeling and spinning company. The Shiga association of registered-property owners, known as Shiga Tobunkai, describes the estate in the same terms: the home of the company's founder.

Otokichi is also remembered as a local benefactor. The family credits him with donating an assembly hall to Kawase Elementary School and a community hall to Inukata-cho, and his eldest son, Shin'ichirō, is said to have served as the last mayor of Kawase village.

Not everything on the plot is the same age. The main house, the Western-style wing and the kitchen wing date from 1928. The reception wing and the tea room were built in 1924, and the two storehouses in 1920; all four were moved to this site in 1928. Shiga Tobunkai records a tradition that the reception wing and tea room came from an earlier family plot to the northwest. In effect, the family carried its older formal rooms across and joined them to a new main house.

Eight registrations, two criteria

All eight registrations are dated 29 November 2016 and carry consecutive numbers, 25-0384 through 25-0391: the main house, the Western-style wing, the kitchen wing, the reception wing, the tea room, the north storehouse, the south storehouse, and the gate and wall. Hikone City's list of cultural properties groups them together as eight privately owned structures.

Two different criteria apply. The five buildings that make up the living quarters were registered as models of architectural design. The two storehouses and the gate and wall were registered for their contribution to the historic landscape, which here means the way the estate reads from the street.

The Agency for Cultural Affairs describes the main house as a large modern Japanese-style residence of lavish, high-quality design. What sets the Wakabayashi Family Residence apart is the combination around it: a Western room attached to a Japanese house, Taishō-era reception rooms relocated and folded into the plan, and a compound that, in Shiga Tobunkai's words, still keeps much of its original condition.

The architect and master carpenter are not known, and the family's website says as much.

How the estate is laid out

A road runs along the north side of the plot. The gate opens a few steps back from it, lined up with the front door of the main house, and from either side of the gate the wall runs east and west before turning at right angles to enclose the grounds. In all, the wall is 68 metres long.

The main house sits slightly north of centre. The kitchen wing steps away to the southeast, the reception wing to the west, and the tea room to the southwest of the reception wing, each offset at the corner from the last. Japanese builders call this staggered layout gankō, after the diagonal line of flying geese; it gives each wing a longer edge facing the garden. The Western-style wing is joined to the northeast corner of the main house, where its red tiles and chimney stand out among the grey roofs.

The two storehouses line up north to south along the eastern edge. The north storehouse occupies the northeast corner beside the Western-style wing, and together they shape the view of the estate from the road.

There is a front garden and a north garden on the road side of the main house, and a large pond-and-stroll garden to the south. The family's website attributes the gardens to Yamamura Bunshichirō II of Hanabun, a landscaping firm in Gokashō, Higashiōmi, and describes a design that borrowed the Suzuka Mountains as a backdrop and fed water in between the artificial hills on the south side. The pond has run dry in recent years. North of the reception wing stands a row of Korean stone figures. The gardens are not part of the registration, yet the reception wing and tea room were plainly built to look out on them.

Visiting and getting there

The Wakabayashi Family Residence is a privately owned home, and its interiors are not open to the public. The Hikone Tourism Association lists it for exterior viewing only, and Shiga Tobunkai's catalogue marks it as closed.

What you can see is the north side, facing the road: the gate and wall, and at the northeast corner the north storehouse and the Western-style wing. The southern garden and the reception, tea room and kitchen wings lie deep inside the plot and cannot be seen from outside.

There are occasional ways in. According to the family's website, part of the house is rented out as event space, and tea ceremony, flower arrangement and other traditional-culture events are held from time to time. Enquiries about bookings and events are handled by email through the website.

We found no official statement on photography. If you photograph the exterior from the road, keep in mind that this is a private home and avoid pointing a camera over the wall into the grounds.

The nearest station is Kawase on the JR Biwako Line (Tōkaidō Main Line), about 2 kilometres from the Wakabayashi Family Residence in a straight line; allow around 30 minutes on foot. We could not find any information on visitor parking. The address is 758 Inukata-cho, Hikone.