Matsumoto Family Residence Main House

One House, Two Halves, Two Generations

The Matsumoto Family Residence Main House (松本家住宅主屋, Matsumoto-ke Jūtaku Shuoku) is a two-storey timber townhouse at Kuchiganaya in the Ikuno district of Asago City, Hyogo Prefecture, built in the early Meiji era with a Taishō-period extension and entered on Japan's national Registry of Tangible Cultural Properties on 9 June 2004. It faces east onto the street, covers 361 square metres, and served as a combined shop and dwelling.

Approach it from the street and the roofline gives the game away before anything else does. The north half sits lower, with a gabled roof and its entrance under the long eave, in the arrangement Japanese carpenters call hirairi. The south half is taller, hipped, and entered from the gable end, which is tsumairi. Two different roof types, two different entry logics, one continuous building.

The north half is the older one, from the early Meiji years, meaning somewhere in the span from 1868 to 1911. The south half was added during the Taishō period, between 1912 and 1925. Both halves have their second-storey walls finished in thick plaster rendered over the structure, a treatment called nurigome that gives the building its heavy, sealed appearance from outside.

Register the two together and the house stops being a house and becomes a record. The Agency for Cultural Affairs entry notes that differences of period are visible in the window treatment and in the bracketed degeta-zukuri eaves detail, and reads the building as evidence of how the Ikuno townhouse form changed over time.

The Town That Silver Built

Kuchiganaya is not an ordinary Japanese town, and the Matsumoto house is not an ordinary townhouse, because Ikuno is a mining settlement.

Silver was found here, according to tradition, in the year 807. Under the Tokugawa shogunate Ikuno became one of the three great mines of the realm alongside Sado and Iwami, administered directly from Edo through a magistrate stationed in the town. In 1868 it became the first mine placed under direct government control in the new Meiji state, and the French engineer Jean-François Coignet was brought in to introduce Western extraction and refining technology. Production continued until closure in 1973.

A silver town develops differently from an agricultural one. As a local resident quoted by a Tajima regional information site put it, Kuchiganaya had no rice fields and no vegetable plots: it was a district of salaried households, which made it unusual for the Tajima region. Everyone here worked for the mine, or worked for the people who worked for the mine. Merchants, innkeepers, doctors and officials clustered along the road running down to what became Ikuno Station.

That is the world the Matsumoto house belonged to. A shop-house of 361 square metres on the main street of Kuchiganaya represents a family doing well out of a mining economy, and the Taishō extension marks the moment they did well enough to build again.

The wider setting has since been recognised twice over. In March 2014 the Agency for Cultural Affairs selected the Cultural Landscape of the Ikuno Mine and Mining Town as an Important Cultural Landscape, the first such selection in Hyogo Prefecture and, as reported, the first anywhere in Japan for a working mining town. The designated area divides into four zones, of which Kuchiganaya is the Meiji-era mining quarter running toward the station. Then in 2017 Asago City, together with Himeji, Kamikawa, Ichikawa, Fukusaki and Yabu, received Japan Heritage recognition for the story of the Silver Horse-Cart Road and the Ore Road, a 73-kilometre route linking Shikama Port to the mines of the interior.

The Matsumoto house was registered a decade before either of those. Registration number 28-0168, from the 42nd round, under the criterion for structures that set a standard in design, announced 24 June 2004.

Walking Kuchiganaya

The pleasure of this place is cumulative. One registered building tells you little; a street of them tells you a great deal. Kuchiganaya holds several registered properties, and the Matsumoto house is best understood as one entry in that sequence rather than as a destination in itself.

Start at Ikuno Station on the JR Bantan Line. The east station building dates from 1895 and was remodelled in 1960; the west building is new, put up in 2009 in a form meant to echo the mining town, roofed in reproduction Ikuno tiles. Those tiles are worth understanding before you walk any further. Ikuno-gawara were fired at high temperature to survive the sharp temperature swings of this mountain basin, and they come out a reddish brown. Local sources report production continuing until around 1935. Once you have seen a run of them, the roofscape of the whole district reads differently.

Then look at the walls and retaining structures. Alongside plaster and charred cedar boarding you will find masonry of a dull, dense, faintly glassy material called karami-ishi, made by casting the slag left over from smelting into blocks. Foundations, garden walls, the abutments of old ore-cart tracks: the waste product of the refining process became the building stone of the town that did the refining. Few places in Japan look like this.

Walking north from the station along the main street brings you past the Matsumoto house among others. Look for the change in eave height between its two halves, then at the second-storey windows on each side, where the difference in period shows most plainly. The degeta-zukuri eaves, in which the second-floor purlin is carried out on projecting beams beyond the wall line, differ in handling between the older and newer portions.

One clear caution. The Matsumoto Family Residence Main House is a private property and the national database records no owner and no public access arrangement. It is not a museum and there is no interior visit. Please look from the street and do not enter the site.

For interiors, go instead to the Ikuno Machizukuri Kōbō Izutsuya, the former Yoshikawa residence, a village inn given to the town and reopened in 1999 as a community base. Also in Kuchiganaya are the former Ikuno police station, a Meiji pseudo-Western building now serving as a district hall, and the former Ikuno Mine staff quarters, both municipally designated. The Ikuno Silver Mine site itself, with walkable tunnels and a museum, lies a few kilometres up the valley at Ono. Asago City lists its opening hours seasonally, so check before setting out. Photography from public streets in Kuchiganaya is unrestricted, and the district is small enough to cover comfortably on foot in an afternoon.