Yokotekan Main Building East Wing

Rebuilt in the Year the Fire Came

Yokotekan Main Building East Wing (横手館本館東棟, also written Yokote-kan Honkan Higashitō) is a three-storey wooden inn building beside the stone stairway of Ikaho Onsen in Shibukawa City, Gunma Prefecture, put up around 1920 and entered on the national register of Tangible Cultural Properties on 1 August 2016.

Shibukawa City's own account of the property gives it an unusually exact origin. The Yokote family sold tobacco on the upper reaches of the stone-step street until the middle of the Meiji era, and moved down to the present plot in 1911. Nine years later a fire ran through the inn quarter and cleared the site. The East Wing was raised that same year, 1920. The West Wing followed in 1921.

So the building carries a date most Japanese inns cannot supply. Its 519 square metres of footprint, three timber storeys under an irimoya hip-and-gable roof sheathed in sheet iron, went up in the immediate aftermath of a disaster, at a moment when the whole quarter was rebuilding at once.

The wing occupies the middle of the site. Guests reach it through the main entrance, and the West Wing continues off to one side.

Registered for What It Does to the Street

The Agency for Cultural Affairs registered the East Wing under a single criterion: contribution to the historic landscape of the country. Registered Tangible Cultural Properties are listed on one of three such grounds, and this one points outward, at the building's effect on everything around it, rather than at any rare detail inside.

The reason becomes clear on the steps below. Glass windows and the eaves of each storey run in unbroken horizontal bands right around the outside, so the wall reads as three stacked ribbons instead of one tall face. Under the main roof and under every smaller eave, exposed decorative rafters called keshō-daruki are left in view, which means the underside of each overhang stays legible to anyone standing lower down the hill.

At chosen points that horizontal rhythm is broken. Dressed round logs serve as engaged posts, rising through the eaves and cutting vertically across the bands. There are not many of them, and the restraint is the point.

Ikaho is built on a steep north-facing slope, which changes what a passer-by actually sees. From the steps you look at roofs and eaves at eye level far more than at front doors. A building that handles its eaves carefully is doing most of the work of the townscape, and that is the case the registration makes. The wing carries registration number 10-0329, issued in the 84th round.

What You Can See, and What Requires a Room

The East Wing is a working ryokan, not an exhibit. Its interiors were reworked in 2010, and the approach taken was selective rather than wholesale: the pillars, ceilings, shoji screens and ranma transoms of the 1920 fabric stayed, with newer comforts fitted around them. Eight guest rooms came out of that work. Seven pair a Western sitting area with a tatami room; one is arranged as sitting room and bedroom. Each has its own toilet and washbasin, which the older West Wing does not, and the lift serves this wing as far as the third floor.

The exterior needs no booking at all. It stands directly on the public stone steps, and the stretch of stairway below the inn is one of the better-known photographic positions in Ikaho. The building is lit after dark.

Bathing brings most people through the door. Yokotekan draws Ikaho's Kogane-no-yu, a sulphate spring heavy with iron that turns rust brown once it meets air; the inn heats the water but adds none, and lets it run through without recirculating. Two large baths, Gekkō-no-yu and Orizuru-no-yu, swap between men and women during a stay. Three family baths sit on the ground floor of the Main Building and cost overnight guests nothing, though they must be booked. Every bath closes between 10:00 and 15:00 for a complete change of water. Day visitors who want a bath are accepted on weekdays only, with the private baths bookable in a narrow window in the late afternoon.

Arriving takes a little planning. The inn has no car park on site; drivers use a dedicated lot several hundred metres away and are collected by the house shuttle. By rail, take the Jōetsu Line to Shibukawa Station, then a Kan-etsu Kōtsū bus about 25 minutes to the Ikaho Onsen stop, from which the inn is a three-minute walk. Winter visitors should note that Ikaho sits high enough, and faces north sharply enough, that road ice is common even when the plain below is clear.

The Rest of the Slope

The stone stairway itself is the reason most people come. It was rebuilt in granite over five years from 1980, and in 2010 a northern extension brought the count to 365, one for each day the town hopes to be busy. Hot spring water runs down a channel along the middle. Ikaho Shrine stands at the top.

Other registered and designated buildings sit within a short walk. The Ikaho Kanko Hotel, a timber three-storey block of 1929 built for foreign guests and topped with a five-storey-pagoda silhouette, was registered in 1998 and is the last of the town's Western-oriented hotels to survive in anything like its original form. The villa of the Hawaiian Kingdom's minister to Japan, Robert Walker Irwin, is a city-designated historic site further along. Tokutomi Roka's novel Hototogisu, which made Ikaho a household name in the late 1890s, is commemorated at a museum nearby.