Hisamatsu Shoten Store and Residence

A Shopfront Built After the Fire

The Hisamatsu Shoten Shop and Residence (久松商店店舗兼住宅, Hisamatsu Shoten Tenpo Ken Jutaku) stands at 3-4-21 Kokufu in Ishioka City, Ibaraki Prefecture, was built around 1930, and was entered on the national register of Tangible Cultural Properties on 23 July 2004.

It faces west onto Nakamachi-dori, the old main street of a town that was once the provincial capital of Hitachi and later the castle town of the Fuchu domain. In 1929 a fire tore through this district. The buildings that went up in its place share a common answer to the problem of rebuilding fast and looking modern while doing it, and Hisamatsu Shoten is among the clearest examples of that answer in Ishioka.

The type has a name: kanban kenchiku, literally signboard architecture. A conventional timber shophouse behind, and in front of it a flat facade raised vertically and finished in mortar, copper sheet or tile to imitate Western masonry. Ishioka's version leans unusually hard towards the Western vocabulary, with almost none of the Edo-period townhouse detail that appears in Tokyo examples of the same type.

Reading the Facade and the Plan

The building is timber-framed, two storeys, tile-roofed, with a building area of 136 square metres. The Agency for Cultural Affairs registered it under the criterion covering buildings that serve as a model of design, with registration number 08-0135; the registration notice was published on 17 August 2004.

Look at the two vertical strips at the outer edges of the front. These pilaster forms are faced in scratch-textured tile laid in stack bond, the courses aligned rather than staggered, which reads as a deliberately machine-made surface. Above them the cornice mouldings are rendered in mortar. Between the two systems, the wall itself has a more complicated history.

The national register records that the wall surface is said to have originally been clad in copper sheet, using the hedged form that the Agency employs when documentary confirmation is incomplete. Ishioka City's account is more specific: the copper on the front wall was requisitioned during the war, the wall stayed bare for a long period afterwards, and copper was applied again in recent years. Ishioka Tourism Association describes the present front as German lap siding, long boards laid horizontally with the overlap worked flat so the surface has no steps, and notes the copper as a prewar treatment. These descriptions may reflect different points in time or different parts of the elevation. A visitor should look and judge rather than expect one account to settle it.

The plan behind the facade follows the pattern of a merchant house. The shop occupies a space four ken across the front and four ken deep, roughly 7.3 metres each way. Behind it lie a ten-mat reception room with a tokonoma alcove and a toriniwa, the earth-floored passage that runs from front to back through the building. A guest room sits on the shop's upper floor.

Visiting the Street

Hisamatsu Shoten traded in cosmetics and general goods. It now houses a shop called Suzumeya, so the ground floor is a working retail space rather than a museum. There is no admission charge and no set visiting hours beyond the shop's own; the interior is accessible to the extent that any shop's interior is, and courtesy applies. The residential portions are private. Photography of the exterior from the street is unrestricted, and this is how most people experience the building.

The reason to come is the row rather than the single building. Hisamatsu Shoten sits beside Jushichiya Hakimonoten, a footwear shop of 1930 whose upper floor carries a bracketed capital ornament between paired vertical windows and a Lombard band under the eaves, and beside Fukushimaya Sato-ten, a sugar merchant's house of 1931 built with concrete walls rather than plaster over earth. Three buildings, three different solutions, one frontage. Sugaya Keshohin-ten, Morito Bunshiro Shoten and Kissaten Shiki stand within a short walk, all registered.

Ishioka Station is about 15 minutes on foot. The tourist information office at the station hands out a walking map of the registered properties, which is worth collecting before setting out because several of the buildings carry no external explanation. Parking is available in the shopping street car park near Chojiya. The Ishioka Festival in September fills these streets with floats, and the town also runs a doll display event in the weeks before 3 March, when a number of the shophouses open more of their interiors than usual.