"Everywhere in this house and its stone walls you can find the wisdom of our ancestors and how they lived," says Masako Kinjo, as she gazes around Makabe Chinaa, a 110-year-old traditional wooden home in Itoman City in the south of Okinawa Island.
It was the wisdom of her ancestors that set the house facing south, as a shelter from northerly winds and to catch the cooling breeze in summer. It was her ancestors who bestowed the roof's deep overhanging eaves to shade residents from the relentless Okinawan sunshine. In the garden, they built a sturdy pigsty, a well and stone walls, which, along with the house, are now prefectural Tangible Cultural Assets.
But it is more miracle than such wisdoms that has seen this beautiful house survive for more than a century. In particular, during World War II, Itoman City was the site of the final, decisive Battle of Okinawa in April, May and June 1945, when just about everything else in the area was razed to the ground.