Yoneda Family Residence Western-Style House

The Western-Style Wing

The Yoneda Family Residence Western-Style House (米田家住宅洋館, Yoneda-ke Jūtaku Yōkan) is a single-storey wooden building in Western style, built in 1941 (Showa 16) toward the south-west of the Yoneda estate in Uyama, Sumoto City, Hyogo Prefecture, and listed as a Registered Tangible Cultural Property in 2004.

It faces the main house across the grounds. Its plan includes an entrance hall, an office and a reception room, and it covers 95 square metres. Among the Japanese-style buildings of the estate, it is the only one in Western dress.

The walls are faced with scratch tiles, the eaves are carried out on a moulded cornice (nokijabara), and a parapet rises above them. Behind the parapet sits a hipped roof (yosemune-zukuri) in tile, so from the front the building reads as a flat-topped Western block.

Why It Was Registered

The Yoneda Family Residence Western-Style House was registered on 2 March 2004, in the 41st round of national registrations, as number 28-0146, under the criterion of serving as a model of good design.

The Agency for Cultural Affairs calls it a fine example of a building whose timber frame is Japanese while its exterior and interior are both elegantly Western. Raising a familiar wooden frame and then dressing it in Western finishes was a common approach to Western rooms in pre-war Japanese houses; here it was used for an office and reception wing.

The office itself is telling. It suggests the Yoneda family ran some kind of business from home, though we found no record of what that business was.

What to Look For

Scratch-tile walls

Scratch tiles are scored with fine grooves across their faces and were widely used in Japanese buildings of the pre-war Showa years. The grooves catch the light and give a wall a soft, textured surface that changes through the day.

Cornice and parapet

A banded cornice carries the eaves, and the parapet above it hides most of the hipped roof from view. The result is the strong, level top edge typical of Western façades.

Japanese bones, Western skin

Because its frame is Japanese, the Yoneda Family Residence Western-Style House shares its carpentry with the Japanese-style buildings around it. Set opposite the Japanese-style main house built in the same year, it puts the estate's mix of East and West on show on the south side of the grounds.

Visiting

The Western-style house is part of a private home. As of October 2026 we found no announcement of interior viewings or tours, and the grounds are closed. It stands toward the south-west of the plot, but we could not confirm whether its tiled walls are visible from outside the property.

Exterior photographs are available in the Agency for Cultural Affairs database of national cultural properties.