Fujita Family Residence Barn

The Working Barn

The Fujita Family Residence Barn (藤田家住宅納屋, Fujita-ke Jūtaku Naya) is a farm barn built in the late Taisho period (1919 to 1926) in Shinkirai, Kitajima Town, Tokushima Prefecture, and was listed as a Registered Tangible Cultural Property in 2016.

It stands midway along the eastern edge of the property and meets the southeast corner of the main house through a later lean-to. Wooden, 2 storeys and tiled, it measures 7.8 metres by 4.9 metres, a building area of 38 square metres, under a gabled roof of hongawarabuki pan-and-cover tiles.

This is where the farm tools were kept, and the Agency for Cultural Affairs describes it as indispensable to the way the homestead worked.

Why It Was Registered

The barn received registration number 36-0150 in the 85th round of national registrations, dated 2016/11/29, under the criterion of contributing to the historic landscape.

A barn is among the least conspicuous buildings on any farm, yet without one the fields could not be worked. By registering the Fujita Family Residence Barn alongside the house and storehouse, the listing protects the whole machinery of a working farmstead, not just the family's living quarters. Its value lies less in ornament than in the role it plays in the group.

What to Look For

Heavy tiles on a small building

Despite its modest size, the barn carries the same pan-and-cover tiles as the main house, so the rooflines of the compound read as a matched set. A small outbuilding bearing a full tile roof hints that the family wanted its buildings to share a common standard.

A mixed roof frame

The roof frame combines nobori-bari, beams laid along the slope of the roof, with ordinary horizontal beams. Sloping beams free up headroom in the middle of the roof space, useful in a two-storey barn whose upper floor served as storage.

The link to the house

A lean-to added at some later date connects the Fujita Family Residence Barn to the main house, presumably so tools could be moved in and out without getting wet, and a sign of how often people went back and forth between the two.

Visiting

The barn is part of a private home and is not open to visitors; as of October 2026 we found no announcement of public access. There is no official guidance on how much of it can be seen from outside, so please do not enter the grounds.

Photographs supplied by the Kitajima Town Board of Education can be viewed in the Agency for Cultural Affairs database.