Mori Family Residence Main House

What the Mori Family Residence Main House Is

The Mori Family Residence Main House (森家住宅主屋, Morike Jūtaku Shuoku) is a merchant house of 1929 in Mitsu 1-chōme, Matsuyama City, Ehime Prefecture, registered as a Registered Tangible Cultural Property (Buildings) on 15 January 2010. It faces east onto the street, and is a two-storey timber building with a tiled roof and a floor area of 156 square metres.

The Mori family ran a general wholesale business in Mitsu, the old Miho district, and also milled rice and barley. Mitsu is a port on the Inland Sea with a strong commercial tradition and an equally strong one in haiku. Mori Yōzaburō, head of the house when the building went up, wrote under the pen name Rensui, and a verse in his own hand is inked on a beam of the roof frame where almost no one would ever see it.

Copper and Granite on the Street Front

The face the Mori Family Residence Main House turns to the street is the reason to look at it. The roof is gabled in the Kirizuma-zukuri manner with Sangawara-buki pantiles, with a Geya pent roof over the front and the back. The frontage measures 8.8 metres, and a gate and wall continue from the house so that the whole street elevation reads as one composition.

What sets it apart is the choice of surfacing. The entire second-floor wall is clad in copper sheet, carried right up into the soffit, while on the ground floor the shop bays facing the street are set on large blocks of granite. Sheathing timber walls in copper or tile spread across Japan after the Kantō earthquake of 1923, as a defence against fire. Matsuyama City's assessment reads this building as part of that current, and 1929 places it squarely in the years when the technique was catching on.

Registration came under the criterion for buildings that contribute to the historic landscape of Japan, on the strength of how completely it preserves the Mitsu merchant-house type.

A House for Negotiation and Poetry

Merchant houses in Mitsu did not work like shops with goods laid out at the front. Business here was done by negotiation and hospitality, and the building was arranged accordingly. The Mori Family Residence Main House is cited as a clear example of the type, and the way the rooms were divided shows why.

According to the city's account, the ground-floor Zashiki was used mainly for haiku gatherings, the upstairs zashiki for family guests, and the Western-style room upstairs for private callers. Three grades of visitor, three settings, one roof. The presence of a Western room alongside Japanese ones is itself a marker of an early Shōwa merchant household.

South of the house, across a passage, stand the kitchen and the bath. Separating the working parts of the household from the rooms where guests were entertained is the logic of a house that expected a steady stream of callers.

Visiting

The Mori Family Residence Main House is privately owned and lived in. The interior is not open, there is no visitor scheme of any kind, and the grounds cannot be entered. Anyone making the trip should plan on viewing the exterior from the public street and nothing more.

Photography calls for the same restraint. If you photograph the elevation from the street, take care that nothing inside the gate or beyond the windows appears in the frame. Ringing the bell to ask for a look inside is not appropriate.

The house stands in Mitsu 1-chōme, within walking distance of Mitsu Station on the Iyotetsu Takahama Line, which is the simplest approach from central Matsuyama. Because this is a private home, avoid lingering in the residential lanes nearby and do not park on the street. Enquiries about the property itself go to the Cultural Properties Division of Matsuyama City.