Tajima Urushiten Former Factory Dining Hall

What the Dining Hall Is

The Tajima Urushiten Former Factory Dining Hall (田島漆店旧工場食堂, shokudō) is a single-story wooden building from the early Showa era (1926 to 1945) in Funao, Kainan City, Wakayama Prefecture, and it became a Registered Tangible Cultural Property on December 5, 2019. It was the factory's service wing, holding dining rooms, a kitchen and a bath, and it runs north to south, attached to the east side of the Entrance Building.

Its exact date is unknown. Wakayama Prefecture says, carefully, that the dining hall is reported to have gone up together with the main house in 1934. The Agency for Cultural Affairs goes no further than "early Showa."

The building covers 105 square meters. Its gabled roof (Kirizuma-zukuri) is sheathed in metal, and a section of it is raised to let in daylight.

Why It Was Registered

The Tajima Urushiten Former Factory Dining Hall was registered for contributing to the historic landscape. The Agency for Cultural Affairs values it as an ancillary building that shows how the lacquer factory was organized. Nothing was refined here, but the building records where the daily needs of the workforce were met in relation to the work floor.

What makes it distinctive is how much it gathers under one roof. According to the prefecture, the dining rooms, the kitchen, the bath and the passage to the Filling Hall all fit into this long, narrow wing. One end touches the main house and the Entrance Building; the other leads to the work floor. Meals and bathing sat between home and factory.

It is a modest building beside the production spaces, yet the Tajima Urushiten Former Factory Dining Hall keeps, in its plan, a record of where the domestic side of the works was placed.

What to Look For

Following the Agency's description, the interior divides along its length. The north side has raised wooden floors holding, from west to east, 2 dining rooms, the kitchen and the bath. The south side is an earth-floored passage leading to the Filling Hall. The passage to the work floor ran right alongside the rooms where people ate and bathed.

Look up at the roof as well. Part of the gable slope is lifted to admit light, a simple fix for a long single-story building whose middle would otherwise be dim.

At the end of the passage is the Filling Hall, the largest of the five registered buildings. The Dining Hall's passage is part of the route from the Entrance Building to the work floor, and walking it gives you a physical sense of how deep the works runs.

Visiting

The Tajima Urushiten Former Factory Dining Hall is on private land, and there is no scheduled opening of its interior (checked September 16, 2026). Because it sits behind the Entrance Building, little of it is visible from the street.

The grounds can be entered during the hours of the on-site café and during events. Whether you can walk through the dining hall or its passage at those times depends on how the buildings are being used. If you want to see the raised roof section or the row of rooms, ask the people running the site to show you. Ask before taking photographs indoors. For access and the times the grounds are open, see the Tajima Urushiten Former Factory page.