Amano Family Residence Outdoor Toilet

About the Amano Family Residence Outdoor Toilet

The Amano Family Residence Outdoor Toilet (天野家住宅外便所, Amano-ke Jūtaku Sotobenjo) is a small detached timber toilet building from the early Taisho era, about 1912 to 1918, on the Amano family estate in Mimigai, Odaka Ward, Minamisoma City, Fukushima Prefecture, registered as a Registered Tangible Cultural Property in 2018.

The Amano Family Residence Outdoor Toilet is a single-storey timber building with a tiled roof and a building area of just 5.6 m², the smallest of the estate's six registered structures. It stands in the north-east part of the grounds, east of the main house, facing west.

Why the Outdoor Toilet Was Registered

The Amano Family Residence Outdoor Toilet was registered as a Registered Tangible Cultural Property for its contribution to the historic landscape, under registration number 07-0205.

The Agency for Cultural Affairs calls it a fine piece of work: a modest outbuilding, but one with delicate detailing. The Council for Cultural Affairs, in its report of 20 July 2018, listed it alongside the main house and storehouses for the same reason.

Outbuildings like this are usually the first things replaced or pulled down. That the Amano Outdoor Toilet survives with its finishes intact, from the same decades as the house and stores, is part of what makes it worth recording.

Details of the Amano Outdoor Toilet

The Amano Family Residence Outdoor Toilet is a single-storey gabled building, a kirizuma roof with its ridge running north to south. Inside it is split into three: an open urinal at the south end and two closets, in the middle and at the north end.

Look at the eaves. The beams run out past the walls and carry the eave purlin on their ends, holding up a deep overhang. Beneath, the eave is finished as a ceiling of slender laths set in small groups, a spacing known as fukiyose.

Those are the habits of the tea house and of sukiya design, the refined, deliberately understated style of Japanese reception architecture. Here they are lavished on a building of 5.6 m². The interest of the Amano Family Residence Outdoor Toilet lies in that care, not in its size.

The main house has its own bath and toilet projecting from the back. Why the family also built a separate, carefully finished outdoor toilet, and how the two were used, is not recorded in the published sources.

Seeing the Amano Family Residence Outdoor Toilet

The Amano Family Residence Outdoor Toilet is part of a private home and is not open.

It stands in the north-east of the grounds, toward the back of the estate, and is likely hidden from the south front by the main house and storehouses, though this has not been checked on site. Please do not enter the property.