Matsuyama Castle Entrance Hall

The smallest registered building on the hill

Matsuyama Castle Entrance Hall (松山城玄関, Genkan) is a single-storey wooden porch attached to the south side of the Entrance Tamon Turret within the keep compound of Matsuyama Castle in Marunouchi, Matsuyama City, Ehime Prefecture, rebuilt in the late Showa era and entered on the national register as a Registered Tangible Cultural Property on September 10, 2019.

At 8.9 square metres it is by far the smallest of the sixteen registered structures at the castle, roughly the floor area of a five-mat room. Its job was never to hold anything. A genkan in this sense is a formal entrance, the point at which a person of rank stepped out of the open air and into the building, and the architecture is entirely about marking that moment.

The building consists of two elements: a Shikidai, the low boarded platform on which a visitor was received, and the staircase that climbs from it into the Entrance Tamon Turret. Over both runs a single roof. The predecessor burned in the arson of 1933 with the rest of the compound buildings, and the present structure belongs to the reconstruction recorded by the Agency for Cultural Affairs as 1967 and by Matsuyama City as completed on May 27, 1968.

Why a porch was worth registering

The register established in 1996 covers structures that contribute to the historic landscape of Japan, and it is a separate instrument from the Important Cultural Property designation held by the twenty-one surviving buildings at Matsuyama Castle. Matsuyama Castle Entrance Hall qualifies because it completes a set. Without it, the keep compound would be a ring of defensive boxes with no explanation of how anyone of standing was meant to enter.

The reconstruction was carried out from basic designs prepared by the Ministry of Education after the surviving structures were listed under the old National Treasure law in 1935, drawings that recorded the porch as it stood before the fire. That is why the decorative programme survives in such specific form rather than being invented in the 1960s.

What to look for

Start with the roof. It rises on a slope and terminates in a mukai-karahafu, an undulating gable of the kind normally reserved for temple entrances and daimyo residences. On a hilltop otherwise given over to plaster, boarding and gun ports, this single curve announces a change of purpose.

The shikidai platform has no walls at its sides. It is left open, so the frame itself becomes the ornament. Above the front pillars runs a Kōryō, a curved tie beam, and on it sits a Kaerumata, a frog-leg strut carved to fill the space between beam and roof. In the panel of wall above, an osa-ranma transom is set with closely spaced vertical slats, the pattern named after a weaver's reed.

Then look for the crest. The three-leaf hollyhock of the Matsudaira house appears on the frog-leg strut, on the Onigawara ridge-end tiles and on the pendant ornament that hangs at the point of the curved gable. Matsuyama is the only one of the twelve castles with surviving pre-modern keeps whose roof tiles carry this crest, granted because the lord's line descended from a half-brother of Tokugawa Ieyasu. Concentrated on a porch of under nine square metres, the effect is deliberate.

Visiting

Matsuyama Castle Entrance Hall stands inside the ticketed keep compound and is seen from the courtyard, which the walking route crosses. Hours are 9:00 a.m. to 5:00 p.m., with closing at 5:30 p.m. in August and 4:30 p.m. in December and January; last admission is 30 minutes before closing and the compound shuts on the third Wednesday of December. Admission is 520 yen for adults and 160 yen for elementary school pupils.

From Matsuyama City Station or JR Matsuyama Station, the Iyotetsu tram reaches Okaido in about 10 minutes, and the Shinonome-guchi ropeway station is a 5 minute walk from there. Ropeway and chair lift share a return ticket at 520 yen for adults and 260 yen for children. From the upper station, allow 10 minutes on foot to the ticket office. The climb on foot from Shinonome-guchi takes about 30 minutes.

Photography for personal use is unrestricted, and the porch is small enough that a standard lens from across the courtyard takes in the whole gable. Live streaming, drones and large equipment are prohibited; commercial shoots need advance application to the castle office.