Toshima Family Residence (Ido, Matsuyama City, Ehime Prefecture)

Seven Buildings Behind an Earthen Wall

Toshima Family Residence, at 421-1 Ido in Matsuyama City, Ehime Prefecture, is a large rural house compound whose main house dates from 1758 and whose seven buildings were designated Important Cultural Properties on 17 June 1970. The Agency for Cultural Affairs registers it as designation number 01776 under the pre-modern folk dwelling category, and lists it as Toshima Family Residence (Ido, Matsuyama City, Ehime Prefecture) to distinguish it from other houses of the same surname.

The site is close to rectangular, roughly 60 metres east to west and 50 metres north to south. A rammed-earth wall runs around it, and a moat turns at right angles along part of the perimeter. Matsuyama City gives the site area as about 3,137 square metres and the combined floor area of the buildings as 975 square metres.

The family served as head village headmen, or held rank equivalent to that office. That position explains the scale. A house of this size in a farming village was not simply a dwelling: it was where tax rice was counted, where the domain's business was conducted, and where travelling officials were lodged.

Four sections of wall are designated alongside the buildings as Tsuketari, the category used for items that belong to a designation without being counted in its main tally.

The Roof That Gave the House Its Local Name

What people in the district have long called the eight-ridged roof of Ido is the reason Toshima Family Residence is remembered at all outside architectural circles. The main house sets a straight block against a projecting wing, and the ridge line that results bends into a reversed Z. Each mass carries its own Irimoya-zukuri roof, so from any angle several gables overlap and the count of ridges changes as you move.

The upper roof is thatched in Kayabuki. Every eave skirt below it is tiled in Hongawarabuki. That contrast, thick straw above and heavy grey tile below, is the single most photographed feature of the house, and it is also structurally logical: thatch sheds water fast on the steep upper slopes, tile holds firm on the shallow lower ones where wind pressure is worst.

Three Parts, Three Sets of Measurements

The Agency for Cultural Affairs breaks the main house into three components and gives each its own dimensions. The living wing runs 24.6 metres by 11.8 metres with eaves on all four sides. The linking section between living wing and formal wing measures 4.9 metres by 8.9 metres. The formal wing is 12.9 metres by 6.9 metres, with a lavatory attached.

Inside, the eastern half of the living wing is Doma, the packed-earth working floor, and the western half is raised and boarded into six rooms including the hearth room, the inner room and the kitchen. The linking section holds two rooms east and west, with an entry step on the east face.

The formal wing is a different world. Three rooms, each fitted with alcove, staggered shelving and a study bay in the Shoin-zukuri manner, wrapped by a wide veranda that turns at a right angle. Matsuyama City records that this wing was used to receive the shogunate's touring inspectors. The Ranma transoms and the fittings show a level of refinement that the working half of the house does not attempt.

A Designation That Spans a Century and a Half

The seven buildings of Toshima Family Residence were not built together, and the gap between the oldest and the youngest is the most surprising thing about the group.

• Main house, 1758. Thatched above, tiled below, three linked wings.
• Front gate, around the middle of the eighteenth century, somewhere in the range 1701 to 1800. A ridge-post gate with a tiled roof.
• Nagayamon gatehouse, late Edo period, 1830 to 1867. Measuring 11.0 metres by 2.5 metres, Kirizuma-zukuri with tile.
• Row house, later Edo period, 1751 to 1829. Measuring 8.3 metres by 4.2 metres, with an eave on the west face.
• Middle storehouse, 1830 to 1867. A Dozo-zukuri structure 5.9 metres by 5.0 metres, its east end joined to the clothing storehouse.
• Clothing storehouse, Meiji era, 1868 to 1911. Two storeys, 4.1 metres by 4.6 metres, its east end joined to the rice storehouse.
• Rice storehouse, 1917. Two storeys, 9.6 metres by 7.1 metres, the largest of the three storehouses.

A Taisho-era storehouse inside an Important Cultural Property designation of an Edo farmhouse is unusual enough to be worth pausing on. The 1917 rice store was not grandfathered in by accident. The designation treats the compound as a working estate that kept being added to, and the three storehouses joined end to end, middle to clothing to rice, read as a single accreting mass rather than three separate objects.

The row house is the quiet one. It began as a stable. The Toshima household was charged with keeping horses for the domain, and the building was converted to living rooms later.

Why It Was Designated, and What Was Repaired

The Agency for Cultural Affairs summarises the value of Toshima Family Residence in a single line: the compound preserves the estate layout of a wealthy landholding family of the Iyo region. The point is the whole, not any one building. Main house, gates, row house and three storehouses stand in their original relative positions inside a walled and partly moated enclosure, and very few houses of this class survive with the outbuildings intact.

Designation came on 17 June 1970. Major repair followed in two campaigns. The main house was dismantled and reassembled between 1972 and 1974. The front gate and five other buildings, together with the walls, were worked on over 23 months beginning in December 1977.

This kind of Kaitai shūri is thorough. Members are taken down one by one, examined, replaced only where decay demands it, and returned to the same position. It is also why the roofline you would see today reads as it did when the house was new rather than as it had drifted by the twentieth century.

Visiting Toshima Family Residence

Toshima Family Residence is not open to the public. Matsuyama City states this plainly on its cultural property page: the compound is a private dwelling and is not opened for general viewing. It remains in private ownership, and the Agency for Cultural Affairs leaves the owner field blank in its database.

That is worth taking seriously rather than treating as a challenge. The site is somebody's home. The earthen wall is the boundary of private land, the approach roads are residential lanes, and there is no visitor car park, no reception and no interpretive signage. Turning up unannounced to photograph over the wall is not something the designation entitles anyone to do.

The house stands in the Ido district in the southern part of Matsuyama City, near where the Shigenobu River runs. If you want to know whether any supervised opening is scheduled, the office to ask is the Cultural Properties Division of Matsuyama City on 089-948-6603. Occasional guided heritage walks in the city have included the property in the past, and that division is the body that would know.

For anyone who wants to see comparable architecture without the access problem, Matsuyama holds several other designated houses and temple buildings that are open, and the city's own cultural property listings are the practical place to start.