Izumiya Ryokan Main Building

An Inn Rebuilt in the Year Tajima Burned

The Main Building of Izumiya Ryokan (和泉屋旅館主屋, Izumiya Ryōkan Shuoku) is a two-storey wooden inn standing in the Tajima district of Minamiaizu Town, Fukushima Prefecture, built in 1934 and entered on the national register of Tangible Cultural Properties on 8 July 1999. It occupies the middle of Tajima's old main street, the road that carried travellers along the Aizu Nishi Kaidō between Aizu-Wakamatsu and the Nikkō plain, and which now runs as National Route 121.

May 1934 is the date that shaped the building. A fire tore through the town that month, and the Agency for Cultural Affairs records that the present main building went up immediately afterwards. The innkeeping family tells the story from a different angle: the inn opened in 1933, and when flames advanced up the street the following spring, the grandfather of the current proprietress ordered his own half-year-old building pulled down, because its tiled roof was the only one on the block and the gap it left could break the fire's run through the thatch. The two accounts point to the same year of construction. They differ on when the business itself began, and that gap has not been resolved in print.

The carpenter brought in for the rebuilding came from Echigo, the old province that is now Niigata. Echigo carpenters worked across northern Japan in this period, and the crew that raised Izumiya used selected figured timbers at the points that would be seen: posts in the entrance hall, transoms, the frames around the stair. The registered floor area is 536 square metres under a tiled roof, which for a mountain town inn of the 1930s is a substantial footprint.

What the Registration Recognises

Registered Tangible Cultural Property is a lighter category than Important Cultural Property. It was created in 1996 to catch buildings from the last century and a half that would otherwise slip away, and it works by notification rather than by permit: the owner keeps the building in use, and reports before making major alterations. Izumiya's main building carries registration number 07-0030, granted in the eighteenth round of registrations, with the public notice dated 21 July 1999.

The criterion applied was contribution to the historic character of the national landscape. In plain terms, the assessors judged that the building holds up the streetscape around it. That judgement rests largely on one element: the porch at the centre of the façade, roofed with a mukai-karahafu, a forward-facing gable whose bargeboard swells and dips in a shallow S-curve, and fitted with bracket complexes of the kind normally reserved for temple and shrine work. Undulating gables of this shape appear on castle gates, temple entrances and the carriage porches of high-ranking residences. Putting one on a commercial inn was a statement about the house's standing in the town, and it still reads that way from the street.

Look at the entrance closely and the woodwork rewards it. The kibana, the projecting nose-ends of the horizontal members, carry carved clouds and pine. Above the sliding glass doors, the framing is original throughout; the glass itself is not. Panes have broken and been replaced across ninety years, and by one account only the rightmost pane still holds the wavy, slightly distorting glass of the 1930s.

Inside, and How to See It

Izumiya is a working inn, not a museum. The way to see the interior is to book a room; the exterior can be admired from the pavement at any hour, and the entrance is the part that most people photograph. Guests should ask at the desk before photographing inside, since the building is also a private home.

Past the glass doors is a long tiled doma, a floor-level hall of the sort that used to receive travellers in from the road with their footwear still on. A corridor runs straight back from it, deep into a plot said to measure around 1,200 tsubo, roughly four thousand square metres, with the buildings arranged along its length and a small watercourse crossing beneath. A steep flight of stairs climbs from beside the hall to the upper rooms.

The Occupation left its own layer. After the war Izumiya was designated as an inn for Allied personnel, and the reception room, meeting room and Western-style bedrooms fitted out at that time are still there, along with the furniture and, in places, English signage. The result is a building where a shoin-style tatami room with a formal alcove opens off the same corridor as a room with patterned wallpaper and a bed. A twelve-mat room at the rear is remembered in the house as having been prepared for members of the Aizu Matsudaira family, a connection said to have come through an elder sister of the proprietress who served in that household.

Timing matters if you want the building at full pitch. Izumiya stands in Kamimachi, one of the neighbourhood groups that take turns running the Aizu-Tajima Gion Festival, held every year from 22 to 24 July. During the festival the inn becomes a staging and rest point for participants, and the street outside fills with the tall wheeled floats and the shrill shangiri music of the Tajima Gion bands. Rooms in Tajima are difficult to secure for those three nights, so book well ahead or plan a day trip.

One name to be careful with. Several inns around Japan are called Izumiya Ryokan, among them one at Reisenji Onsen in Nagano Prefecture. The registered main building described here belongs to the Izumiya Ryokan in Kamimachi, Tajima, Minamiaizu Town, Fukushima Prefecture.

Getting there is simple. Aizu-Tajima Station on the Aizu Railway is about five minutes' walk away, and through trains from Asakusa in Tokyo run to it via the Tobu, Yagan and Aizu lines. Within the same short walk are the National Route 121 shopfronts, the Kokken sake brewery a few doors along, and, about ten minutes on foot, the former Minamiaizu District Office of 1885, a pseudo-Western timber building designated an Important Cultural Property by Fukushima Prefecture in 1971 and open to visitors as a local history museum.