Watanabe Family Residence (Higashikatacho, Matsuyama City, Ehime Prefecture)

A village headman's estate south of Matsuyama

The Watanabe Family Residence (渡部家住宅, Watanabe-ke Jūtaku) stands in Higashikatacho, Matsuyama City, Ehime Prefecture, and its four buildings, the main house, front gate, rice storehouse and storehouse, were designated an Important Cultural Property on 17 June 1970.

The family arrived here in 1844, when a third son was sent out from Minamikata village, in what is now Toon City, to establish a branch household at the wish of the lord of the Matsuyama domain. His role was shōya, the headman who collected the rice tax, settled disputes and stood between the villagers and the domain. The Watanabe held that post in Higashikata from then on.

The main house now on the site was begun in 1860 and its ridgepole raised in 1866. The six years of construction covered the most turbulent stretch of the late Edo period, but nothing about the finished building suggests urgency.

The grounds cover 3,095 square metres and the buildings 661 square metres of floor area. A gate opens to the south, two white-plastered storehouses stand along the east side, and an earthen wall runs around the perimeter. The Agency for Cultural Affairs names that wall alongside the four buildings and states that the aim of the designation is to preserve the whole compound, house plot included. This is a property whose value lies in an intact arrangement rather than in any single structure.

Four buildings, four decades apart

The designation covers four buildings as one property, yet more than forty years separate the oldest from the newest. Walking the grounds takes a visitor through construction from the end of the shogunate to late Meiji.

Main House, 1866

Measuring 23.1 metres by 12.0 metres, partly two-storeyed, roofed in the Irimoya-zukuri hipped-and-gabled form with eaves running around all four sides and covered in Hongawarabuki round-and-flat tiling. A privy and a projecting section on the north are attached. The plan is a large sugoya, a single elongated block running east to west, with the southern rooms given over to guests and the northern rooms to the family. Small chambers, the staircase, closets and shelving fill the seam between the two.

The detail to look for is on the roof. Above the earth-floored Doma alone sits a koshiyane, a raised monitor roof finished in Kayabuki thatch. Against an expanse of grey tile, that patch of thatch reads as a deliberate break in material. It works as a smoke vent, and it also marks from outside exactly where the working part of the house lies.

Front Gate, mid-18th century

A Nagayamon gatehouse of 19.7 metres by 6.1 metres, hipped-and-gabled, tiled, with eaves on the north face and rooms in its two storeys flanking the passage. The Agency for Cultural Affairs assigns it to the mid-18th century, giving a range of 1701 to 1800, which makes it the oldest of the four by roughly a century. A visitor therefore passes through a gate that was already generations old when the house behind it was new.

Rice Storehouse, 1908

Built in Dozo-zukuri, the thick-walled plastered technique, 13.7 metres by 8.2 metres and two storeys, with a Kirizuma-zukuri gabled roof in round-and-flat tile and a west eave in Sangawara-buki pantile. It is the youngest building on the site.

Storehouse, 1891

Also dozo construction, 13.8 metres by 7.2 metres over two storeys, gabled, tiled, with the same pantiled west eave. It is 1 metre narrower than its neighbour and seventeen years older. Seen side by side, the two storehouses show how little the local formula for a plastered warehouse shifted across the Meiji period.

Why it was designated

Matsuyama City gives two reasons for the designation: the main house is a representative surviving example of a wealthy farmer's dwelling built as a large single block on the plain, and the gate and storehouses together with it form a complete compound.

The second reason carries the weight. Headmen's houses survive across Japan, but usually as a main house alone, its gate demolished, its storehouses sold off, its walls replaced by hedge or fence. Here the gate, the two storehouses and the earthen wall all remain, and the sequence in which they were added can still be read building by building. That is why the designation reaches beyond the structures to the plot itself.

The buildings were dismantled and rebuilt in a full conservation programme between 1974 and 1976, and what stands today is the result of that work.

What rewards a slow look

Stand in the doma and look up. Heavy curved beams are stacked in tiers overhead, plane-finished rather than left rough. Timber of that scale, worked to that finish and then multiplied, was the clearest way a rural household could state its standing. Rank in a farmhouse shows in structural members before it shows in ornament.

In the Zashiki reception rooms, the carved Ranma transoms and the built-in writing alcove repay attention. The lower walls are finished in haritsuke-kabe, white paper pasted directly over an earthen ground, which lifts the light in rooms that have few windows.

One wall in the room used for household devotions is a donden-gaeshi, a panel that pivots to open a way through to the birthing room behind. Matsuyama City describes features of this kind as elements of samurai residential design absorbed into a farming household. The Watanabe were commoners, but the way rooms are divided and the way people moved between them borrows from warrior housing.

The split between front and back is something a visitor feels rather than reads. The guest rooms facing south are open and bright; the family rooms behind are lower and darker. A headman had to receive officials and raise a family under one roof, and the plan makes that double life plain without a word of explanation.

Visiting

The Watanabe Family Residence opens on Sundays only, from 9:00 a.m. to 4:00 p.m., and admission is free. It closes from 29 December to 3 January. On any other day of the week the gate stays shut, so the day matters more here than the hour.

The address is 1238-1 Higashikatacho, Matsuyama City. This is farmland in the southern part of the Matsuyama plain, well away from any railway station. By car it is about 15 minutes from the Matsuyama Interchange on the Matsuyama Expressway, and there is parking on the grounds. Without a car, a taxi from Matsuyama-shi Station is the practical approach.

The main house, rice storehouse and front garden can be hired for events between 10:00 a.m. and 4:00 p.m.: 900 yen an hour for the main house, 450 yen an hour each for the rice storehouse and front garden, and 900 yen an hour for the full car park or 450 yen for half. Any part-hour counts as a full hour. Applications go through Matsuyama City, and the forms are on the city website.

Matsuyama City publishes no statement on photography. Personal snapshots are unlikely to raise any issue, but for tripod work or commercial shooting, contact the Cultural Properties Division of the Matsuyama City Board of Education on 089-948-6891 in advance. The same office handles general enquiries.