Yokotekan Main Building West Wing

Four Timber Storeys That Could Not Be Built Again

Yokotekan Main Building West Wing (横手館本館西棟, also written Yokote-kan Honkan Nishitō) is a four-storey wooden inn building at Ikaho Onsen in Shibukawa City, Gunma Prefecture, dating from about 1921 and entered on the national register of Tangible Cultural Properties on 1 August 2016.

It did not begin with four storeys. Shibukawa City records that the wing was built in 1921, a year after the East Wing, and that its third and fourth floors were added in the early Shōwa period. The Agency for Cultural Affairs notes alterations in two later phases, between 1926 and 1945 and again between 1966 and 1989, which fits that account. What stands today is a building that grew upward on a slope, in stages, as the inn's business grew with it.

The footprint is 369 square metres, smaller than the East Wing's, and the roof is sheet iron. Fourteen guest rooms occupy the wing, and the inn's own description holds that the Main Building was constructed throughout in hinoki cypress.

The Criterion: Not Easily Reproduced

Registered Tangible Cultural Properties are listed on one of three grounds. The East Wing next door was registered for its contribution to the historic landscape. The West Wing was registered under a different clause: that it would not be easy to reproduce. Registration number 10-0330 was issued in the 84th round.

Two things sit behind that judgement. The first is structural. Building four timber storeys of guest rooms is something present-day fire and building regulation makes difficult in a dense inn quarter, and the technique used here is worth naming. Each floor's outer wall is carried outward by segai, a method in which beam ends project from the wall below to support the storey and the eaves above it. Stack that four times and the elevation steps out slightly as it rises, with glass windows and eaves fitted with decorative keshō-daruki rafters running horizontally at every level. The exterior treatment matches the East Wing, so the two read as one building from the street.

The second reason is inside. The Agency's description singles out how well the guest rooms preserve their original condition, along with the choice timbers used, the inventiveness of the joinery, and the fine work in the shoji screens and ranma transoms. Rooms of this kind were made by carpenters working to no repeating pattern, and the labour that produced them is not readily available now.

Fourteen Rooms, No Two Alike

The inn states that none of the fourteen rooms in the West Wing repeats another. Each takes shoin-zukuri as its starting point, the formal study-room layout of the samurai house, and then departs from it. Sliding fusuma divide two connected tatami rooms; the main room runs about eight to fourteen mats, with a subsidiary room and a wide hiroen veranda alongside.

These rooms have been left as they were. That means no bath and no toilet inside: washrooms and basins are shared, along the corridor. Air conditioning has been fitted. The lift, which is in the East Wing, stops at the third floor, so the fourth is reached on foot.

The trade is a plain one, and worth understanding before booking. Guests give up private plumbing and gain a room built in 1921 that has not been gutted since.

Look up while you are in it. The ranma transoms above the sliding doors, the pattern of the shoji lattice, and the grain chosen for each post differ room to room, and the variation is the whole point of the wing. Hanging scrolls from the Meiji through mid-Shōwa periods are placed in the rooms.

Calligraphy, a Novel, and the Bath

The signboard of the Main Building was brushed by Tokutomi Sohō, who founded the newspaper Kokumin Shimbun in 1890. His younger brother Tokutomi Roka serialised the novel Hototogisu in that paper beginning in 1898, and the book made Ikaho known across the country. The inn also displays calligraphy by Gotō Shinpei and a painting by the Kyoto artist Takeuchi Seihō, and the signboard of the concrete annexe was written by Kishi Nobusuke. These pieces hang where guests pass rather than in a treasury.

Bathing is shared with the rest of the house. Yokotekan draws Ikaho's Kogane-no-yu, an iron-bearing sulphate spring that oxidises to rust brown on contact with air; the water is heated, never diluted, and runs through without recirculation. Two large baths, Gekkō-no-yu and Orizuru-no-yu, alternate between men and women. Three family baths on the ground floor are free to overnight guests by reservation, with two more available for a fee. Every bath is closed between 10:00 and 15:00 while the water is changed. Day visitors are taken on weekdays only.

Reaching the inn means leaving the car behind: there is no parking on site, and drivers use a dedicated lot with a house shuttle. By rail it is Shibukawa Station on the JR Jōetsu Line, then about 25 minutes by Kan-etsu Kōtsū bus to the Ikaho Onsen stop, and three minutes on foot. The exterior of the wing can be seen at any time from the public stone steps, which climb 365 treads to Ikaho Shrine and pass a good many other historic buildings on the way, among them the 1929 Ikaho Kanko Hotel, itself registered in 1998.