Former Maeda Family (Kindee) Residence Kamayakata

A Stone Fire-Room Opposite the Village Office

The Kamayakata of the former Maeda House, locally called Kindee (旧前田家（キンデー）住宅釜屋形, Kyu-Maedake Kindee Jutaku Kamayakata), is a single-storey stone building of the early Taisho era, roughly 1912 to 1918, standing at Honson 1-chome in Niijima Village, Tokyo, and it was entered on Japan's national register of Tangible Cultural Properties on 6 March 2024. It covers 8.4 square metres.

Kindee is the yago, the house name by which the household was known on the island. Islanders use these names in ordinary speech far more than surnames, which is why the register carries it in brackets alongside the family name.

A kamayakata is a fire building. In the traditional houses of Niijima the cooking hearth and the bath were placed in a separate structure from the main dwelling, for the obvious reason: a roof full of fire is a roof you want at a distance. This one holds two rooms end to end on a north-south axis. The southern room has an earthen floor and a stone hettsui, the island word for the built cooking stove. The northern room is the bath.

It stands on the plot facing the Niijima village office, on Honson, the island's main settlement. The walls are stone. So is the roof.

Koga Stone, and Why the Registration Happened

Niijima lies about 150 kilometres south of central Tokyo in the Izu island chain, and it is administratively part of the Tokyo Metropolis, a fact that surprises most first-time visitors. Most of the Izu islands are built of dark basalt. Niijima is not. It produces koga-seki (コーガ石), a pale, light rhyolitic pumice stone quarried on the island and found in commercial quantity in very few places on earth.

Because the stone is light and workable, islanders built with it rather than with timber, which had to be shipped in. Houses, storehouses, walls, wells, cisterns, pigsties, gravestones: the settlement is stone from the ground up, and in some buildings the roof is stone too, cut into tile-like slabs. Roughly seventy percent of houses on the island still incorporate koga stone. Nowhere else in Japan does a stone-building tradition survive at this density.

It stopped being a living practice. Roofing-grade light stone ran out, and building regulations closed off all-stone construction. What remains is a finite stock, and a group of architects and residents, the Niijima Kokaseki Building Survey Group, has spent more than two decades recording and arguing for it.

The argument landed in 2024. Following a Council for Cultural Affairs recommendation of 24 November 2023, five koga-stone properties on Niijima were registered together on 6 March 2024: the Umeda (Okigoro) house stone storehouse and outhouse, the Kino house main building and its kamayakata, this Maeda kamayakata, and the Kokubo house main building. The criterion applied was contribution to the historic character of the national landscape. The Agency's assessment of the Maeda kamayakata is brief and specific: it preserves the freestanding kamayakata form unusually well, and conveys the character of the island's traditional dwellings. Registration number 13-0508, the 106th round.

Niijima's first registered property came earlier: the Maeda house outhouse, a small vaulted stone privy registered in February 2004. It sits at a different address in Honson 2-chome and should not be confused with this building.

Reading a Building of 8.4 Square Metres

Eight and a half square metres leaves little room for architectural gesture, which is what makes the construction legible. The form is kirizuma-zukuri tsumairi: a gabled roof with the entrance on the gable end, so you walk in facing the triangle. Roof and walls are both stone.

Look at the junction between them. In a timber building a wall plate would sit on posts and carry the roof frame; here the purlin is laid directly onto the top of the stonework. There is no intervening carpentry. The mason and the carpenter have swapped roles.

Inside, the southern room keeps its earthen floor and the stone hettsui, a mass of shaped koga stone that absorbed a century of cooking fires. The northern room, the bath, is smaller and darker. Islanders who grew up with buildings like this describe them as unremarkable, which is precisely the point: this is domestic infrastructure, not display architecture, and it survived because nobody thought to replace it.

Visiting takes commitment, and honesty about access is worth more than encouragement. The registered koga-stone buildings sit within private residential plots and are ordinarily viewed only from the street. The Maeda kamayakata has been opened to the public during Tokyo Cultural Properties Week in early November, when local organisers have run building tours, stone-carving workshops and exhibitions; those openings are announced year by year and should not be assumed. Check with the Niijima Village office or local information sites before travelling for that purpose alone.

Reaching the island: a jetfoil from Takeshiba Pier in Tokyo takes from about two hours twenty minutes, the overnight ferry from the same pier around eight and a half hours, and Shinchuo Airlines flies from Chofu Airfield in about forty minutes on a nineteen-seat propeller aircraft. From Niijima Airport, Honson is roughly twenty minutes on foot, about 1.5 kilometres. A free community bus circulates on the island. The village office is a straightforward landmark to navigate to, and the kamayakata is on the plot across from it. Photograph the exterior from the public street and respect that people live here.