Sakurabayashi Family Residence Inner Room

What the Sakurabayashi Family Residence Inner Room Is

The Sakurabayashi Family Residence Inner Room (櫻林家住宅奥座敷, Sakurabayashi-ke Jūtaku Okuzashiki) is a two-storey timber reception wing built in 1912 in Miyaharacho, Kofu City, Yamanashi Prefecture, and was listed as a Registered Tangible Cultural Property of Japan on 7 August 2023 (registration no. 19-0167). It stands near the centre of the homestead of the Sakurabayashi, a family that practised medicine here from the Edo period onward.

In a traditional Japanese house the okuzashiki, literally the inner or back reception rooms, is where guests were received and where weddings, funerals and other formal occasions took place. It was set deep in the house, away from the kitchen and the family's everyday rooms, and it usually received the best timber and the most careful carpentry the household could afford.

The building has a hip-and-gable (irimoya) roof covered in sangawara pantiles, with the ridge running east to west, and a building area of 130 square metres. An entrance and kitchen were added on the east side in 1967, and a toilet wing is attached to the north. The West Document Storehouse joins it on the west and the East Document Storehouse on the north, so the formal rooms and the family's storehouses form one connected block.

Why It Was Registered

Of the five Sakurabayashi buildings, only the Sakurabayashi Family Residence Inner Room was registered under the criterion for structures that serve as a model of design. The gate and the three storehouses were listed for their contribution to the historic landscape. The national database describes the wing as a refined example of modern Japanese-style (kindai wafū) rooms in a doctor's residence.

Kindai wafū is the term Japanese architectural historians use for Meiji-era and later buildings that kept to traditional timber construction while pushing it toward greater refinement: carefully chosen woods, slender members, and meticulous joinery. As Western-style architecture spread through Japan, many prosperous rural families chose to invest in exactly this kind of formal room instead.

The Council for Cultural Affairs summarised the Sakurabayashi Family Residence Inner Room as a spacious building with three interconnected rooms on each floor. It shows how much a country doctor's household on the edge of Kofu was prepared to put into the rooms where it received guests at the very end of the Meiji era.

What to Look For

Inside, each floor is laid out as a run of three rooms in a line. With the sliding partitions removed, the three become a single long hall. Repeating that arrangement on both storeys is what gives the wing the spaciousness the Council's summary noted.

On each floor the west end is given over to the formal alcove arrangement. One of the photographs in the national database shows the innermost ground-floor room with its Tokonoma and the adjoining Tokowaki side alcove. The rooms grow more formal as one moves westward, ending at the alcove in the innermost room.

The detail worth pausing over is the Ranma, the transom panels above the partitions. Here they are filled with kumiko, fine strips of wood fitted together without nails into geometric lattices, so that the boundary between each pair of rooms is marked by a screen of light and shadow. Figured timbers are used around the posts and alcoves, and the overall effect is light and precise rather than heavy.

From outside, the defining feature is the double tier of hip-and-gable roofs. The entrance and kitchen on the east are the 1967 additions rather than part of the 1912 building, so it helps to keep the original block in mind when reading the outline of the building.

Visiting the Inner Room

The Sakurabayashi Family Residence Inner Room is part of a private home and its interior is not open to the public. Because it stands in the middle of the property, behind the nagayamon gatehouse, the wing cannot really be seen as a whole from outside, and visitors may not enter the grounds.

There is no published policy on photography. The location of the property and what can be seen from the road are covered on the Sakurabayashi Family Residence page.