AT A GLANCE
Why go?
The Janes Residence is the oldest surviving Western-style building in Kumamoto Prefecture, and a window onto the city's most remarkable moment of modernization. Built in 1871 as the family home of Leroy Lansing Janes—an American educator hired to run the pioneering Kumamoto Western School—it is now a Prefectural Important Cultural Property that tells the story of how a small domain school helped reshape Japanese education, agriculture, and even the founding of the Japanese Red Cross.
The two-storey house mixes a distinctly Western look—a wraparound veranda, tall chimney, glass windows and ornamental trim—with traditional Japanese timber framing. Inside, exhibits display Janes' own belongings alongside relics of the Hakuaisha, the relief society whose founding was approved here and that grew into the Japanese Red Cross. Destroyed in the 2016 earthquakes, the residence was faithfully reconstructed using around 70% of its original timbers and reopened in 2023 beside the tram line in the Suizenji-Ezuko Park area.
A house built for a radical experiment in education
In the fevered first years of the Meiji era, the Kumamoto domain decided it needed a school for Western learning and recruited an American to lead it. That teacher was Captain Leroy Lansing Janes, a West Point graduate and former Union artillery officer in the Civil War, who arrived in 1871 with his wife Harriet and young daughter. To give the family suitable lodgings near Kumamoto Castle, the local government commissioned the house still standing today—a striking blend of Western veranda-colonial styling and Japanese carpentry, and the oldest Western-style building in the prefecture.
