Okuno Motoke Residence

About the Okuno Motoke Residence

The Okuno Motoke Residence (奥野本家住宅, Okuno Motoke Jūtaku) is a town-house estate at 27 Mori, Hakuta-cho, Yasugi City, Shimane Prefecture, centered on a main house built in 1872, whose five buildings were registered as Registered Tangible Cultural Properties of Japan in 2005. The five are the main house, the treasure house, the barn, the rice storehouse and the workshop. All were entered as Registered Tangible Cultural Property structures on February 9, 2005, under the consecutive registration numbers 32-0029 to 32-0033.

A word on the name. The characters 本家 usually mean "main family" and are normally read honke, but the Agency for Cultural Affairs gives the reading motoke here, so the full name is pronounced Okuno Motoke Jūtaku. The estate now belongs to Yasugi City.

The Agency's database describes the Okuno Motoke main house as a building that faces east onto the old road, single-story with a partial upper floor, yet tall enough to read from the street as a full two-story house. It rates the house as an early-Meiji Machiya that serves as a landmark for the area.

From 1858 to 1923 at the Okuno Motoke Residence

The oldest building on the estate is not the main house. The treasure house, a fireproof storehouse whose name points to the family's valuables, is dated to 1858, near the end of the Edo period. The main house followed in 1872, the barn in the late Taishō era, and the rice storehouse and workshop together in 1923.

Read in that order, the Okuno Motoke buildings record a household that kept its late-Edo storehouse, rebuilt its house on the road in the first years of Meiji, and half a century later added a working yard at the back.

How the Okuno Motoke Estate Is Arranged

The main house stands at the front on the road. According to the Agency for Cultural Affairs, the treasure house lies to its southwest and the barn to its northwest. The rice storehouse sits between the barn and the workshop, and the workshop fills the northwest corner of the plot.

Those three northern buildings all run east to west under gabled (Kirizuma-zukuri) pantile (Sangawara-buki) roofs, with their doors on the south side. The barn shares a single run of eaves with a storehouse beside it, and the rice storehouse and the workshop share both roof and eaves, so the three read as one linked range northwest of the main house. Inside the barn, the east half is an earth-floored soy sauce and miso store and the west half a board-floored storeroom; the workshop has a plain board-floored room in its western half and an earth-floored work area in the east. Food preparation, storage and daily chores were all handled in this one corner.

The treasure house and the rice storehouse are two-story storehouses in the Dozo-zukuri manner, each with a separate "floating" roof (Okiyane). In floor area, the main house covers 365 square meters, the workshop 78, the barn 47, the treasure house 46 and the rice storehouse 24.

Each building has its own page with details of its structure.

The Okuno Motoke Residence and the Mori Townscape

Mori was the castle town of the Mori domain, a small fief assessed at 10,000 koku of rice. The Yasugi City Tourism Association introduces it as a district where samurai houses survive alongside old family homes, merchant houses and the estates of wealthy farmers, most of them along the old road that the Okuno Motoke main house faces.

On February 9, 2005, the same day as the five Okuno Motoke buildings, four structures of the Okuno Shogo Family Residence (188 Mori) and seven buildings of the Yamamoto Family Residence (71 Mori) were also registered. Each is a separate estate at its own address. The Okuno Shogo main house faces west onto the road, the opposite way from the Okuno Motoke main house. The two households share the Okuno surname, but no official source we found explains how they are related.

Visiting the Okuno Motoke Residence

Although the Okuno Motoke Residence is owned by Yasugi City, neither the city nor the Yasugi City Tourism Association publishes opening days or admission details for it. If you hope to see the interior, contact the Culture Division of the Yasugi City Board of Education (phone 0854-23-3185; city offices are open weekdays 8:30 a.m. to 5:15 p.m.) well in advance. Otherwise, plan to view the main house from the road. The barn, rice storehouse, workshop and treasure house stand behind it and are hard to see from the street. No official guidance on photography could be found.

By public transport, take the Yasugi City "Yellow Bus" on the Hakuta (Kusano) to Yasugi line from JR Yasugi Station on the San'in Line and get off at the Mori stop. The timetable shows a ride of about 26 to 31 minutes. Buses are few, only a handful a day, and some do not run on Saturdays, Sundays or holidays. By car, the tourism association puts Mori about 15 minutes from Yasugi Interchange on the San'in Expressway, and it lists the Mori Community Center (phone 0854-37-0225) as the contact for the townscape.