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Yoshihiro Takishita, president and founder of The Association for the Preservation of Old Japanese Farmhouses (APOJF), is an architect and art collector.
Born in the snow country of rural Gifu prefecture, he studied law at Waseda university in Tokyo. After graduating in 1967, he oversaw the dismantling, removal, reconstruction, and renovation of an old farmhouse in Fukui prefecture for an American foreign correspondent living in Kamakura.
This experience aroused his interest in the rescue and preservation of such farmhouses, called minka. Despite an architectural tradition going back a thousand years, they are rapidly disappearing from the countryside. The farmers there are discarding them for modern, easily-heated and maintained western-style houses.
During a post-graduation tour of thirty-five countries in Europe, the Middle East and the U.S., he gained a new appreciaiton of his country's art and culture from the Japanese screens, porcelains, scrolls, paintings, and sculptures in the famous museums he visited.
On his return to Japan, he began his art collection housed in the minka he had built in Kamakura. He founded the House of Antiques and became a leading art dealer.
Ten years later, at the request of another American, he moved a second minka from Gifu to Karuizawa, a well-known mountain resort, where he renovated and rebuilt it. That marked the start of his second career, this time as an architect, specializing in the narrow, but personally fulfilling field of minkas.
Since then he has removed, rebuilt and modernized minkas all
over Japan as well as Hawaii and Argentina. At the same time he has
maintained his growing business as an art collector and dealer.
His book on Japanese minkas, generously illustrated with photos and textual explanations, was published in 2002 under the title Japanese Country Style, Putting New Life into Old Houses (Kodansha International).
Favorably reviewed in the United States and Japan, it has gone into a second printing. Amazon books gave it a five-star rating, its highest.
Its theme reflects his love of these old, wooden farmhouses and their uniquely Japanese style of architecture.
He created the Association for the Preservation of Old Japanese Farmouses as a non-profit, non-governmental organization to encourage farmer-owners to make them liveable through modernization, or failing that, transfer them to new owners who will.
Determined to rescue as many of them as he can, he offers his expertise without charge to owners interested in such projects. The first, involving a famous old school in Massachusetts, and a Japanese minka owner, is scheduled to be launched early in 2005.
(Japanese Country Style home page: http://minka-ichiku.com)
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