Sato Family Residence Detached Wing

A Room Built for Stepping Back

The Detached Wing of the Sato Family Residence (佐藤家住宅離れ, also written Satō-ke Jūtaku Hanare) is a small single-storey annexe in the Izumi district of Fukushima City, Fukushima Prefecture, built in 1932 and entered on Japan's national register of tangible cultural properties on 24 December 2013.

It attaches to the west face of the main farmhouse, toward the northern end, and runs on an east-west axis. The roof is gabled and clad in sheet iron, with lean-to geya projections front and back. Building area comes to 55 square metres, a fraction of the 267 square metres the main house occupies.

The Agency for Cultural Affairs records the purpose plainly: the wing was added for the head of the household in retirement. That single line explains almost everything about how the rooms are arranged.

Inkyo, the practice of a household head formally handing over his position and withdrawing from the running of the farm, was a real institutional step in rural Japan rather than a figure of speech. The man who stepped back did not leave. He moved sideways, into quarters of his own, and the family built him somewhere appropriate to go.

Sixty Years After the Main House

The gap in dates is the interesting part. The main farmhouse went up in 1873, the document storehouse two years later, the miso storehouse the same year as the house. The detached wing arrived in 1932, close to six decades after everything around it.

Its materials show the interval. The main house carries thatch; this wing carries sheet iron, a roofing material that spread through rural Fukushima in the early twentieth century because it was cheap, light and did not need renewing every few decades the way thatch does. Nobody was going to re-thatch a room for one elderly man.

What the family did spend on was the interior. The principal room measures eight tatami mats and holds a toko, the recessed alcove for a hanging scroll and a seasonal arrangement, alongside a hira-shoin, a flush study window built into the wall beside it. A six-mat tsugi-no-ma adjoins as an anteroom. These are the fittings of a formal reception space, not of a bedroom. A retired head of house still received visitors, still had rank within the family, and the room was equipped to let him do so with the correct degree of ceremony.

A lavatory sits on the north side. Along the south runs a corridor, and this corridor does the structural work of the whole compound: it threads from the main house through the wing and on to the document storehouse, tying three separately registered buildings into a single circulation route. The wing is the hinge.

Registration number 07-0145, granted in the seventy-sixth round. The criterion applied was the one for buildings that help form the historic character of the Japanese landscape. Registration is the lighter of Japan's two protection systems, introduced in 1996 for buildings roughly fifty years old and upward; owners keep living in them and notify the Agency before altering the exterior substantially.

Reading the Compound From the Road

Seen from outside, the wing is easy to miss. It is low, plain and half-hidden behind the bulk of the thatched roof next to it, and the eye goes to the main house every time. The reward of knowing it is there is that the farmstead stops looking like a single old building and starts looking like a sequence: 1873, 1875, 1932, each addition answering a need the household had at that moment.

One thing has to be said before anyone plans a trip. This is somebody's house, lived in, with no visitor arrangements of any sort: no opening hours, no ticket desk, no signage. The Agency leaves the owner field empty, its usual convention for buildings in private hands. The eight-mat room described above is not something a member of the public can see, and the edge of the property is the edge of what a visitor may approach. Photograph the roofline if you like; leave windows and doorways out of frame.

The district lies on the Fukushima Kotsu Iizaka Line, four stops and around ten minutes out of Fukushima Station at Izumi. Walking in from Iwashiro-Shimizu, the previous halt, takes about the same time. Trains carry on north to the hot springs at Iizaka.