Former Kumakura Family Residence

A concrete house with an earthen storehouse behind it

The Former Kumakura Family Residence stands in Yanagawamachi, Date City, Fukushima Prefecture, where two buildings, one of the late Edo period and one of the early Showa years, were listed as Registered Tangible Cultural Properties on 5 December 2019. The property now belongs to Date City.

The two are the main house and a storehouse, registration numbers 07-0225 and 07-0226. They were the first buildings in Date City to be registered nationally.

They stand in the centre of Yanagawamachi, the house at the front and the storehouse behind it to the east. Two buildings separated by nearly a century share one plot.

Western detail reaching a provincial town

The main house is reinforced concrete, two storeys with part of it rising to three, covering 120 square metres, with a viewing room on the top floor. A private house in a provincial town built in reinforced concrete in the early Showa years is itself unusual.

The outside is finished in rough German render and kept plain. Western detail appears only at the entrance and the veranda; everything else is unadorned. Inside, the rooms are Japanese apart from Western rooms around the entrance. In both cases the Western manner is reserved for where guests arrive.

The house was listed as something not easily reproduced, one of the three available criteria, as an example of how Western design spread into the provinces.

The storehouse was listed on different grounds, for contributing to the historic landscape. Two buildings on one plot, listed for two different reasons, is a fair summary of the place.

A storehouse with two banded courses

The storehouse at the Former Kumakura Family Residence is late Edo work, some ninety years older than the house. It is two storeys of Dozo-zukuri under a gabled Sangawara-buki tiled roof running east to west, with a lean-to on the west front, covering 45 square metres.

The walls are Shikkui plaster with two banded courses running round them, and the plaster is carried right over the rafters. Nothing about it was done cheaply, and that shows from outside. Around the upper west opening the plaster turns black, the one point of dark in an otherwise white wall.

The storehouse also changes how the house reads, because it shows that the concrete building replaced something on a plot already old in the Edo period. The Agency for Cultural Affairs describes it as setting off the bearing of a leading local family's premises.

Visiting

The Former Kumakura Family Residence belongs to Date City. The 2019 report of the Council for Cultural Affairs recorded that the city had taken ownership and intended to prepare the buildings for opening. What has happened since is not documented in the sources consulted here, so ask Date City if you want to visit.

The exteriors can be seen from the streets of central Yanagawamachi. The Western detail at the entrance and veranda, and the roof of the storehouse behind, are what read from the road. Photography from the public road is unrestricted.

The address is 48 Ushirojomachi, Yanagawamachi, Date City. The straightforward approach is the Abukuma Express to Yanagawa Station from Fukushima.

This information was checked on 17 September 2026.