Aoki Family Residence Main House

A Retirement House Built on Indigo Money

The Aoki Family Residence Main House (青木家住宅主屋, Aokike Jūtaku Shuoku) is a two-storey timber house of 1915 at Miyanomae, Mima-chō, Mima City, Tokushima Prefecture, entered on Japan's national register of Tangible Cultural Properties on 9 October 1998. It occupies roughly the centre of a walled compound of 3,590 square metres on the north bank of the Yoshino River.

The compound is the point. Earthen and brick walls about two metres high close the whole plot. Inside, the main house stands at the middle, a barn to its west, and storehouses with a long warehouse block fill the north-west corner. Each element holds its own registration, all entered on 9 October 1998: the main house, the barn, the warehouse block, two storehouses, a four-legged gate, and the walls themselves.

Measured for the register, the main house covers 149 square metres of building area under an irimoya roof, the hipped-and-gabled form, laid in tile at generous scale, with a pent roof running round all four sides beneath the main eaves. Mima City's tourism material gives the frontage as eleven ken, about 20 metres, and the depth as six ken, about 11 metres, which describes a larger footprint than the registered figure; the two numbers are measured differently, and the Agency for Cultural Affairs value is the one that governs.

The wall finish is what people remember. Nezu-shikkui, grey lime plaster tinted with soot or fine ash, covers the exterior instead of the white plaster usual on houses of this rank. Against tiled roofs and a green surround it reads as restraint rather than display. The upper-storey window treatment is picked out in the registration record as a distinguishing feature.

Why the Whole Compound Was Listed

The Aoki house came in under the criterion for buildings that set a standard of design. Its registration number is 36-0010, from the fourteenth round of listings, which places it among the earliest entries from Tokushima Prefecture; the registration system itself had existed for only two years.

What the Agency's citation records about the household explains the architecture. The Aoki were farmers who produced indigo, and in the modern period they moved into the construction business and prospered. Awa indigo dominated the Japanese dye trade through the Edo period, and the Yoshino River plain grew rich on it before synthetic dyes arrived from Germany in the late nineteenth century and the market collapsed. This house was built in 1915, well after that collapse, as a retirement residence for a family that had already shifted its capital into building work.

Indigo left a physical trace on the ground. One of the two storehouses at the north-west corner is recorded as having been used in indigo production, its lower north wall finished in namako, the lattice of square tiles set in raised white plaster ridges that gives storehouses their quilted look.

Registration treated the site as a single composition, and the smaller buildings show why. The barn is low and plain, but it repeats the grey plaster of the main house and adds a boarded lower wall to match. The warehouse block runs long and deliberately low to close the western edge of the plot, weatherboarded on its west and south faces and left with exposed posts on the east, a switch of finish that keeps the enclosure from reading as one continuous surface.

Even the boundary was designed. Along the north and east, forty-four metres of earthen wall rise from a stone base, buttressed at roughly one-ken intervals on the inside, plastered towards the road and rendered in mortar on the east; the road-side coping rests on a course of bricks laid on the diagonal. The south side is closed by forty-two metres of brick walling, its buttresses turned outward instead. The four-legged gate north of the house is tiled in hongawara on the road elevation and in ordinary pantiles on the garden side. Few rural properties of this date survive with the whole establishment intact.

Getting There and What to Expect

Mima City owns the property. The family donated it to the former town of Mima in 1992 after some three decades of the house standing empty, and it has since been used for community gatherings, flower-arranging classes, music and dance evenings, and wedding receptions. There is no permanent exhibition and no standing admission schedule, so anyone wanting to see the interior should contact the Regional Learning Promotion Division of the Mima City Board of Education before travelling. The exterior and the walled perimeter can be viewed from the road.

From Handa Station on the JR Tokushima Line the drive takes about five minutes; from the Mima interchange on the Tokushima Expressway, about ten. Route 438 runs north to south through the district. Public transport is thin, and a car makes the difference between seeing one property and seeing several.

Two national historic sites sit within a short drive. Kōzato Haiji is the excavated site of a temple founded in the Hakuhō period around thirteen centuries ago, the oldest known temple site in the prefecture, laid out with pagoda and golden hall side by side in the Hokki-ji arrangement; a ginkgo said to be seven hundred years old stands at its centre. Dan-no-Tsuka-Ana, a group of large late-period burial mounds, lies about two kilometres from that temple site. Mima-chō also holds a temple quarter, a row of walled temple compounds that repays a slow walk.

Photograph the compound wall before the house. The line of earthen and brick walling running along the road, unbroken and higher than head height, is what tells you the scale of what stands behind it.