Former Sumitomo Besshi Mining Company Foreign Engineers' East Residence

A 1930 Western House on the Hoshigoe Rise

The Former Sumitomo Besshi Mining Company Foreign Engineers' East Residence (旧住友別子鉱山株式会社外国人技師東社宅) is a two-storey timber house in Western style at Hoshigoecho in Niihama City, Ehime Prefecture, built in 1930 and entered on the national register as a Registered Tangible Cultural Property on 17 August 2020. Its building footprint covers 196 square metres and its total floor area 318 square metres. It stands on the high western edge of the Sumitomo Yamada company housing estate, across a small road from its slightly smaller twin, the West Residence.

Copper had been coming out of the Besshi mine since 1691, worked without interruption by the Sumitomo family. In October 1927 the mining division was spun off from the Osaka head office as Sumitomo Besshi Mining Co., Ltd. Its managing director, Washio Kageji, ordered an ore survey the following year and learned that the veins would not last much longer. His answer was to remake the town rather than wind it down: a new harbour with reclaimed land for factories, a road network, whole neighbourhoods of company housing, and the opening of the mine railway to ordinary passengers. Yamada was where the housing went.

The ground itself was manufactured. Tailings from the Hoshigoe ore dressing plant, finished in 1925, were run into the marshy valley below, then capped with a layer of red earth cut from the surrounding hills, 45 centimetres to 60 centimetres deep. The Yamada river was straightened, drains and streets laid out on a grid, and each plot raised and graded at a slope of one in forty so that rainwater ran off in every direction. Washio also replaced the board fences customary at Japanese company housing with clipped hedges, which is why photographs of the estate look more like a garden suburb than a mining settlement.

Why the Building Was Registered

The Former Sumitomo Besshi Mining Company Foreign Engineers' East Residence was registered under the criterion covering buildings that set a standard of design. It carries registration number 38-0145 and was announced in the 96th round of registrations, together with the neighbouring residence of the Besshi mine superintendent and several executive houses.

What makes it unusual is who it was built for. Quarters for the foreign specialists hired by the Meiji government survive at a few of the old state-run mines, but houses put up by a private company in the Showa era for foreign engineers, and still standing in something close to their original form, are rare. Niihama City's conservation plan describes the two Yamada houses as Showa-period counterparts to those earlier government quarters.

The reason engineers were needed is well documented. In June 1929 the first phase of a sulphuric acid plant using the process invented by the German chemist Hugo Petersen came on line, the decisive measure against the smelter fumes that had plagued Shisakajima island; Petersen himself came to inspect the works that August. In November of the same year the Sumitomo fertiliser works brought in engineers from the American firm NEC, and an ammonia and ammonium sulphate plant opened in December 1930. The two houses of 1930 were built into that wave of imported technology.

One tenant can be named. In July 1931 a German engineer recorded in company papers as Gareppu, from the Demag works, moved in with his wife on a three-year contract negotiated in Germany the previous autumn by Hayakawa Koichi of the machinery section, who wanted Demag's crane technology. Mrs Gareppu had chaired a federation of women's associations in the Rhineland; in Niihama she ran German classes at the local primary school and sent essays to English-language newspapers. Mimura Kiichi, who arrived in February 1932 as superintendent of the Besshi mine, also lived in this house at first, as family photographs confirm.

The Sunroom and the L-Shaped Plan

The silhouette is set by a hipped roof, or Yosemune-zukuri, covered in Sangawara-buki pantiles. The pairing is worth pausing over: a Western house wearing an ordinary Japanese roof. The walls are Shitami-itabari, horizontal weatherboard, painted white and trimmed in dark green, which is what makes the house read from a distance among the tiled Japanese roofs of the rest of the estate.

Projecting from the south front is a sunroom under its own hipped roof, glazed with floor-level windows that open straight onto the garden. On the west side is a single-storey service wing, where the kitchen and servants' rooms were kept, its roofline dropping away from the main block.

Both floors follow the same arrangement. A large room in the southeast corner acts as the hinge, with three rooms turning off it in an L. Rather than threading rooms along a corridor in the Japanese manner, the plan opens outward from a corner hall, which is simply how a European household of the period expected to live.

The house does not present a single moment, though. After the war, when the foreign engineers' dormitory across the road was lost, the East Residence was pressed into use as lodgings for executives posted to Niihama without their families, and its rooms were cut up and refitted as separate tatami rooms. The Agency for Cultural Affairs records the date of the building as 1930, with additions in the early and middle Showa period. Built as a Western house, lived in as a Japanese one, and now shown again as a Western house: the layers are part of what there is to see.

Visiting

The Former Sumitomo Besshi Mining Company Foreign Engineers' East Residence is one of four Yamada houses that Niihama City has restored and now opens to visitors. From April to November it is open every Sunday; from December to March, on the 2nd and 4th Sundays. Hours in both seasons are 10:00 a.m. to 12:00 noon. Admission is free and no booking is needed. Openings are occasionally changed or cancelled while conservation work is under way, so anyone travelling a distance should confirm with the city's Besshi Copper Mine Cultural Heritage Division on 0897-65-1236.

Groups of 5 or more should reserve by telephone or email at least 2 weeks ahead. Rules on photography differ from building to building, so ask the staff on site before taking pictures indoors.

The address is 19-1 Hoshigoecho, Niihama City; the Agency for Cultural Affairs register gives the older land description, 1900 Hoshigoecho. The site lies about 2 kilometres west of Niihama Station on the JR Yosan Line, roughly a 30-minute walk, and free parking is provided. The superintendent's residence, the Sumitomo Chemical executive house and the West Residence all open on the same days and stand within a few minutes' walk. Two further houses built for Sumitomo Joint Electric Power can be viewed from the outside only.