Kubo Family Residence Detached Wing

A Medicine Store That Became a Shopfront

The Kubo Family Residence Detached Wing (久保家住宅離れ, Kuboke Jūtaku Hanare) is a two-storey wooden building at 918-1 Dōgo Yunomachi in Matsuyama City, Ehime Prefecture, put up around 1914 as a medicine store and study room and entered on the national list of Registered Tangible Cultural Properties on 27 February 2023.

It occupies the north-east corner of a physician's walled estate on the approach road to Isaniwa Shrine, and it is the only one of the five registered structures on the plot that ordinary visitors can walk into. The roof is an Irimoya-zukuri hipped gable in Sangawara-buki pantiles. The upper floor is given generous height, and a Geya pent roof wraps the west and south sides at ground level. Floor area is 40 square metres.

Matsuyama City records the original function plainly: the ground floor held medicines, the upper floor was where the household studied. The Agency for Cultural Affairs notes repair work in 1928, 1949 and 2011. According to the city, the building was converted into a shop around 1953 and let to an antique dealer, after which a succession of tenants came and went. It is in commercial use today.

Why the Building Is on the National Register

Registration, introduced in 1996, is the lighter of Japan's two systems for built heritage and is meant for buildings that are still in service. That fits this one exactly. The Kubo Family Residence Detached Wing was accepted under the criterion of contributing to the historic landscape of the country, carries registration number 38-0167, and was registered alongside the main house, the waiting arbour, the front gate and the partition gate.

Its value lies in the record of change rather than in unaltered fabric. Dōgo Yunomachi turned from a bathing town into a tourist street across the twentieth century, and this small outbuilding was rebuilt each time the street changed around it. The Taishō-period frame survives underneath a Shōwa shopfront. Reading the two together is the point.

The other four structures on the estate are private and shut. This one has been open in some form for seventy years, which makes it the part of the Kubo estate most people actually experience.

What to Look For

The north face, the one on the approach road, is the shop face. A sliding-door entrance sits in the centre under a tiled canopy, with a half-bay door pocket to its east and a transom above worked in the manner of a Shitaji-mado. West of the door is a glazed bay window built as a display case, roofed in copper laid in single courses. At the north-east corner a service door hides behind a low tiled board fence, with a canopy carried out from the main body to form a porch. The whole of this front, ground floor and upper floor alike, is rendered in mortar, and the east wall has been patched in printed steel sheet.

Now count the windows on the upper floor of that front. There are two. Neither is a window. Inside, the corresponding wall is the back of a closet, finished in plaster, and the openings are decoration applied to keep the street elevation lively. The joinery is doing shopkeeping.

Walk around to the south side and the building changes character. Here the frame is left exposed in Shinkabe construction, and the upper floor is glazed almost end to end, with a balcony rail set at sill height under a small eaves hood. That side faces the garden of the main house. The upper room was designed to look at it.

The interior repeats the split. The ground floor is now two rooms of bare earth, the floors long since taken out. Upstairs, a six-mat room to the west holds a Tokonoma whose frame is stepped in two levels, and a three-mat room lies east of the stair. The Kōran rail, the wide glazing and the alcove all belong to the study; the mortar and the display case belong to the shop.

Visiting

The Kubo Family Residence Detached Wing is privately owned. It is not run as a cultural property with opening hours or an admission charge, and there is no guided visit. Because it is let as commercial premises, the ground floor can normally be entered as a customer during trading hours. Trading hours, the tenant and the trade itself have all changed before and may change again, so confirm before making a special trip.

The exterior is public at any hour. Stand on the approach road for the shopfront and the false upper windows; the south elevation with its glazed upper floor sits inside the walls and cannot be seen from the street. Photography of the exterior from the road is unrestricted. Inside, ask the occupant first.

Take the Iyotetsu city tram to the Dōgo Onsen terminus, walk through the Haikara-dōri arcade to the bathhouse, then turn east onto the Isaniwa Shrine approach. Allow about eight minutes on foot. The building stands at the far end of the Kubo estate's street frontage, past the gate and its plastered wall. Questions about the registration go to the Cultural Properties Division of Matsuyama City on 089-948-6603.