≫ Area ≫ Bikan Historical Area In the Kurashiki Bikan Historical Area, visitors can enjoy a quaint landscape with Japanese-style storehouses with white walls, namako walls, and rows of willows. The townscape with about 400-year-old traditional buildings and the retro-modern view along the Kurashiki River continue to attract people from around the world.
In the Kurashiki Bikan Historical Area, visitors can enjoy a quaint landscape with Japanese-style storehouses with white walls, namako walls, and rows of willows. The townscape with about 400-year-old traditional buildings and the retro-modern view along the Kurashiki River continue to attract people from around the world.
This area is one of the most popular tourist destinations in the prefecture and is lined with specialty shops, including canvas, jean, and Japanese sake shops and cafes made from renovated traditional wooden townhouses. This area also offers other attractions, such as riverboat rides and the museum of art, and visitors will never get bored strolling in this area all day.
This is a Western-style wooden building built as Kurashiki Town Hall in 1917. The building can be used not only as a tourist information office but also as a free rest house with multipurpose restrooms, coin-operated lockers, and vending machines. It is equipped with a free water station from the perspective of the SDGs.
The Kurashiki River once bustled with boats carrying goods. Visitors can enjoy the quaint atmosphere on a boat in a relaxed manner.
*Tickets are available at the Kurashiki-kan Tourist Information Office.
The museum was opened in the renovated rice storehouse built in the Edo period. It not only exhibits over several-thousand-year-old stoneware and earthenware pieces discovered in the southern part of Okayama but also engages in research and studies.
The square is a complex completed by renovating the factory of Kurashiki Spinning works. The complex surrounded by striking red brick walls has a pottery studio and a hotel. Kurabo Memorial Hall introduces the history of the spinning industry.
As Japan's first private museum featuring Western art, the museum was established in 1930. The museum exhibits and stores famous Western paintings including the works of El Greco and Claude Monet, modern and contemporary Japanese artworks, and Oriental and Eastern antiquities.
Top and bottom images: Ohara Museum collection
The Ohashi family, who made a fortune by developing new rice fields in the Edo period, built this townhouse in 1796. It still has a distinctive classic merchant townhouse look.
This house is about 300 years old and the oldest extant townhouse in Kurashiki Bikan Historical Area. It is designated a national important cultural property and was once owned by an old important family that led the town administration.
The heads of the Ohara family that laid the foundation for the development of Kurashiki lived in this house for generations. The history of the Ohara family is introduced through the collections and modern exhibits.
This is the former vacation house of the Ohara family built by Magozaburo Ohara. It is also called Midori Goten (green villa) due to its distinctive green tiled roof.
*Visitors can look at the house only from the outside unless it is specially opened to the public.
This is the event that marks the coming of spring. The entire Kurashiki Bikan Historical Area is lit up with gentle, warm lights (akari).
This complex includes a hotel, apartment, and multiple commercial tenants. There is also a citizen interaction space that tourists can also use casually called Achiterraspot (equipped with a nursing room, handicapped accessible restrooms, Kurashiki free Wi-Fi, etc.).
The building was originally built in 1893 as the vacation house of Koshiro Ohara, the first president of Kurabo Industries Ltd. Today, it has a spacious Japanese-style resting room and an authentic Japanese tea room and is open to the public.