Former Kono Family Residence (formerly Located in Oda Town,

Former Kōno Family Residence: A Bamboo-Floored Mountain Farmhouse at Shikoku Mura

Inside the Shikoku Mura open-air museum, on the wooded slope below Mount Yashima in Takamatsu, sits a thatched farmhouse whose raised floor is laid not with wooden boards but with split bamboo. This is the Former Kōno Family Residence (Kōno-ke Jūtaku), a small mountain dwelling that once stood far to the west, in the Oda area of southern Ehime. It was moved here in 1979, repaired and rebuilt timber by timber, and in 1982 it was designated an Important Cultural Property.

The house came from a settlement near the western end of the Shikoku mountains, at an elevation approaching 500 metres. The original site lay in what was then Oda Town, Kamiukena District; through later municipal mergers that area is now part of Uchiko Town in Kita District. Construction is placed in the 18th century. The national cultural-property database files it as late Edo, while the museum's own account describes it as a building of the late 1700s; the exact year is not recorded.

It is a modest structure, with a frontage of about 12.6 metres and a depth of 6.7 metres. The roof is an irimoya form, a hipped roof whose upper section breaks into gables, and it is thatched across its whole surface, with gable boards set at each end of the ridge. The plan faces south. Entering from the west, a visitor passes first through the doma, the earthen-floored work area, then into the chanoma, the everyday room with its hearth, and finally the zashiki, the formal room at the eastern end, fronted by a narrow veranda. This side-by-side two-room arrangement, known locally as yoko-futama-dori, was the ordinary farmhouse layout across the southern Iyo region.

Why the House Was Designated

Two-room farmhouses of this kind were once common in the mountains of southern Iyo. Few of the early ones survived. The Kōno house is one of the relatively old surviving examples of the regional standard type, and that alone gives it documentary value: it shows how an ordinary farming family in these highlands actually built and used its home.

What sets it apart is the floor. Across the entire raised-floor section, the boards a visitor might expect are replaced by slats of split bamboo, a sunoko floor. Over the bamboo, the household laid simple woven mushiro mats and lived on those. The reason is practical rather than decorative. In the 18th century, turning logs into smooth floorboards meant long hours with an adze and a hand plane, so finished planks were expensive. In a mountain settlement where cash was scarce, bamboo slats were the sensible choice, and here they cover the whole living area rather than a single room. Adding to the effect, the rooms have no ceiling boards, so anyone standing inside looks straight up into the exposed roof framing and can read the carpenter's joinery for themselves.

The house also preserves something rarer still. Set near the chanoma is a large kettle once used to steam kōzo (paper mulberry) and mitsumata (paperbush), the raw fibres of Japanese washi paper. Papermaking was a winter side-industry for farming families in these valleys, and surviving equipment for it inside a dwelling is unusual. It records, in physical form, how a mountain household earned a little beyond what its fields could give.

Both rooms contain an irori, a sunken hearth built up from stacked stone, packed with clay, and finished with a square wooden frame. At roughly 500 metres up, these uplands see real snow in winter despite Shikoku's reputation for a gentle climate, and the two hearths were a matter of survival as much as comfort.

What to Look For on a Visit

Step across the threshold and look down before you look around. The give of bamboo underfoot, rather than the solid feel of planking, is the first thing the house tells you about the life it held. Then look up: with no ceiling to hide it, the full structure of beams and rafters is open to view, and the way the joints lock together rewards a slow pause.

Near the working end of the house, find the steaming kettle for paper mulberry. It is easy to walk past, but it is the clue to how this family balanced farming with papermaking. The two hearths, one in each room, show where daily life and warmth were concentrated.

One detail worth noticing is the closet beside the zashiki. The house was originally built without any fitted storage at all; the closet was added during a later phase of the Edo period and was kept in the restoration because it, too, had become part of the building's history. Small changes like this are easy to miss, and they are part of what makes a relocated farmhouse more than a frozen image of one moment.

Around Shikoku Mura and Yashima

The Kōno house is one of 33 buildings gathered at Shikoku Mura, an open-air museum of about 50,000 square metres that brings together houses, work sheds, granaries, a rural kabuki stage, a soy-sauce works and sugar-pressing huts from across the four prefectures of Shikoku, spanning the Edo to the Taishō eras. Among them, the sugar-pressing huts are themselves a nationally designated Important Tangible Folk Cultural Property. The grounds also hold a gallery designed by the architect Tadao Ando, a two-thirds-scale replica of the Iya vine bridge that visitors can cross, an udon restaurant, and a café set inside a Western-style house relocated from Kobe.

The museum lies at the foot of Yashima, a flat-topped mesa plateau rising over the Seto Inland Sea. Yashima was the site of a decisive 1185 battle between the Genji and Heike clans, and the summit gives long views across the islands of the inland sea. Yashima-ji, the 84th of the 88 temples on the Shikoku pilgrimage, stands on the plateau above. The museum is reached on foot from JR Yashima Station, and a shuttle bus runs up to the summit area in a few minutes for those who want to combine the two.