Kimura Family Residence Main House

A ship chandler's shop on a Mitsu back lane

Kimura Family Residence Main House (木村家住宅主屋, Kimura-ke Jūtaku Shuoku) is a wooden merchant house at Mitsu 1-chome in Matsuyama, Ehime Prefecture, built in 1881 and listed as a Registered Tangible Cultural Property on 29 March 2019.

The house faces west onto a narrow lane one block behind the harbour front. Its frontage measures four and a half ken, roughly 8 metres, and the two-storey timber frame covers a building area of 119 square metres. Latticed bay windows run across the front of both floors. What catches the eye from the lane is the height of the upper storey: the posts and beams are left exposed in Shinkabe construction with Shikkui plaster between them, and the eaves are carried on projecting purlins, a treatment that gives the facade its Meiji-period character. The roof is Kirizuma-zukuri with Sangawara-buki tiling, entered from the long side in the Hirairi manner.

Tōnai Shōbei built the house in 1881 to serve a shipping business that also sold gear for vessels. The Tōnai family sold it to the Kimura family in 1890, and from then on it worked as a shop and a home at the same time. According to Matsuyama City, the only substantial change came in the Taishō era (1912 to 1926), when the second head of the household, Kimura Matasaburō, rebuilt the area around the earth-floored passage. Repair work in 2017 replaced the heavy Hongawarabuki roof with lighter pantiles, renewed the earthen walls and wallpaper inside, and swapped out decayed members outside before the timber was re-stained.

Why the house carries registration number 38-126

The Agency for Cultural Affairs lists Kimura Family Residence Main House under the criterion that a building contributes to the historic character of the national landscape. The reasoning is legible from the street. Mitsu was the harbour that handled goods and passengers for Matsuyama, and the shop fronts of its merchant families set the rhythm of these lanes. Very few of those fronts survive with their original proportions intact.

Three more structures on the same plot were registered on the same day: the storehouse, the detached wing and the bathhouse. Together the four buildings preserve the layout of a nineteenth-century harbour merchant's property, from the shop on the lane to the storehouse that once faced open water. Kimura Family Residence Main House holds registration number 38-126, and the other three follow in sequence.

What to look for inside

The plan follows the standard merchant format of the region. A Doma passage runs along the south side from the entrance to the rear, and three rooms sit in a row along the north: the shop, the middle room and the guest room. Early in the Taishō era the family carved out further spaces along this line, adding a maid's room beside the rear doorway and an office and tea room on the passage side of the middle room.

A boxed staircase in the middle room leads up. The second floor is where the household's ambitions show. Toward the street is the tsushi, a storage loft whose roof frame uses rising beams to keep the space tall. In the centre are a middle room and a sleeping room, and to the east a guest room fitted with a Tokonoma, a Tsukeshoin with a carved Ranma transom above, staggered shelves with a low cabinet, and a household shrine shelf a full ken wide set high on the wall. Merchants travelling from distant ports are said to have stayed here.

Stand in the earth-floored passage and look up before you climb. The exposed frame overhead, blackened by decades of cooking smoke, is the part of Kimura Family Residence Main House that photographs least well and rewards the eye most.

Visiting Kimura Family Residence Main House

The building is privately owned and is looked after by local volunteers, who open it on the second and fourth Saturday of each month from 1:00 p.m. to 6:00 p.m. as Kimura-tei Café. The interior can be seen while the café is running, and the group also opens the house for concerts, shamisen classes and pottery sales on other dates. There is a winter break, and the schedule can change, so check the operators' Instagram account or telephone 070-5510-3145 before travelling. Admission itself is not charged; you pay for what you order.

From central Matsuyama, take the Iyotetsu Takahama Line to Minatoyama Station, walk two minutes to the landing, and cross on the Mitsu Ferry. The crossing is legally a city road, so it runs free of charge from 7:00 a.m. to 7:00 p.m. every day of the year, and the house is about one minute from the Mitsu side landing. Mitsu Station on the same line is about a fifteen-minute walk away. There is no parking at the house, and the lanes around it are narrow.

Photography inside has not been confirmed as permitted, so ask the volunteers on the day, and bear in mind that other guests are usually seated in the rooms. The exterior, which is the part the registration criterion turns on, can be seen from the public lane at any hour.