Furusato Travel Village Retirement House

A house built for stepping down

Furusato Travel Village Retirement House (ふるさと旅行村隠居屋, Furusato Ryokōmura Inkyoya) is a small single-storey timber dwelling of 1905 that stands in the Shimohatanogawa district of Kumakogen Town, Ehime Prefecture, and it entered the national register as a Registered Tangible Cultural Property on 31 January 2003.

The word inkyoya names a building type rather than a family. When the head of a farming household handed the land and the accounts to the next generation, the older couple did not always retreat into a back room. Around Kumakogen, according to accounts gathered when the building was surveyed, the practice was to raise a second, smaller house in the same yard. Two roofs, one family, a short walk between them.

This one was built in 1905 and moved to its present site in 1980, when the town assembled a group of vernacular buildings inside Kumakogen Furusato Travel Village. The Agency for Cultural Affairs records the frame as four and a half ken along the front and two and a half ken deep, with a building area of 73 square metres. That makes Furusato Travel Village Retirement House the second smallest of the five registered buildings on the site.

Why the building carries a registration number

The register lists it as number 38-0035, one of five entries from this site accepted in the thirty-fifth round of registrations. The notice appeared on 26 February 2003; the registration itself dates from 31 January of that year. The criterion applied was the first of the three used for Registered Tangible Cultural Property listings, which covers buildings that stand as a model of design in their type.

What earns the listing here is ordinariness done well. The house carries no crest, no carved transom, no reception room for guests of rank. Its interest lies in what it proves about how rural households in this mountain basin arranged themselves across two buildings, and in how completely a modest structure of that kind survives. Buildings like this were normally the first to be pulled down when a family rebuilt.

What to look at

Start at the ground. The base is a line of rounded river stones, laid out and levelled, with the sill beams run over them and the posts stood on the sills. No concrete, no cut stone plinth. On a wet morning you can see where the rain runs off the stones and where it does not.

Then look up. The roof is Irimoya-zukuri, hipped below and gabled above, covered in Sangawara-buki pantiles. Of the five registered buildings gathered here, Furusato Travel Village Retirement House is the only one under tiles. Its neighbours wear thatch or sheet metal, and the difference is visible from thirty paces: a hard, ridged, grey surface against the deep soft mass of a thatched roof.

The scale rewards a slow circuit. Walk the four and a half ken of the front elevation and you have covered the whole width of a house that once held a complete household. The eaves come down low. A visitor of average height will find the underside of the roof close overhead at the corners, which is exactly the sensation the builders were working with.

Visiting

Furusato Travel Village Retirement House stands inside the grounds of Kumakogen Furusato Travel Village at 488 Otsu, Shimohatanogawa, Kumakogen Town. The site is owned by the town and has been run under contract by a local operating company since 2023. The office takes visitors from 8:00 a.m. to 5:00 p.m. on telephone 0892-41-0711.

The village closes for the winter. In the 2026 season, cottages operated from 11 April to 14 November and the campsite from 1 April to 23 November, so a visit outside that window needs a call first. No admission charge for the registered buildings is published, and no scheduled interior opening is announced either. Ask at the office on arrival: staff can tell you which buildings are unlocked on the day.

Photography of the exteriors is not restricted by any published rule, but the buildings sit among camping pitches and rental cottages, so keep other visitors out of frame. By car, the site is about 40 minutes from the Matsuyama interchange on the expressway. Without a car, take the JR Shikoku Bus Kumakogen Line from JR Matsuyama Station to the Kumakogen stop, roughly 1 hour 20 minutes, then a taxi for the remaining 7 kilometres.