Masui Residence Study

The Oldest Building on the Lot

The Masui Family Residence Shoin (増井家住宅書院, Masuike-jūtaku Shoin) is a late Edo-period reception wing in Ōgimachi, Takamatsu City, Kagawa Prefecture, built at some point between 1830 and 1867 and entered on the national register of Tangible Cultural Properties in 2009.

It is the senior building in the compound by a wide margin. The main house beside it went up in 1907 and the tea house behind it in 1912, which makes this wing older than both by four decades or more. When the family rebuilt the front of the property in the Meiji era, they kept the reception rooms their grandparents had used and built the new house up against them.

The wing runs east from the main house along the same street, presenting a frontage of 15 metres. Its roof is a gable clad in hongawara tiles, with a lower secondary eave carried across the front, and part of the roof has since been re-covered in sheet metal. The register gives the building area as 166 square metres, which makes it the largest of the three registered structures here. The whole wing was renovated in 1956.

Inside, the plan is simple and deliberate: an eight-mat room to the north, next to the main house, and a ten-mat room to the south, facing the garden. The ten-mat room is the formal one, and it carries the full apparatus of a shoin reception space.

What Makes a Room a Shoin

The word shoin began life meaning a study alcove in a monk's quarters, then became the name for a whole architectural grammar. By the Edo period a formal reception room was expected to assemble a specific set of fittings, each of which told a guest where to sit and how the household ranked itself. The Masui ten-mat room has them.

There is a toko, the recessed alcove for a hanging scroll and a flower arrangement, which fixes the seat of honour: the most important guest sits with his back to it. Above the adjoining alcove space sits a tenbukuro, a small closed cupboard set high against the ceiling, used for scroll boxes and incense utensils. And there is a hira-shoin, a flat writing alcove built into the exterior wall. The distinction matters to anyone reading the room: a tsuke-shoin projects outward as a bay with a desk board and a low window, while a hira-shoin keeps flush with the wall plane. The flat version is the quieter, more restrained choice, and it belongs to a merchant house that wanted the vocabulary of the warrior class without shouting about it.

Above the sliding panels run ranma, open transoms that let air and light pass between rooms while the fusuma below are closed. The register notes that the transoms and the sliding panels themselves carry decorative treatment. Its summary judgement of the room is shōsha, a word that means elegant in the sense of trim and unfussy rather than lavish.

Along the south side, facing the garden, runs a low kirime-en. That is a board veranda laid with the planks running perpendicular to the building, so the cut end grain faces out towards the garden, as against the kure-en where boards run parallel to the wall. It sounds like a carpenter's footnote. In practice it changes what your eye does: the lines of the boards lead outward, pulling attention off the veranda and into the planting beyond.

Registered for the Streetscape

Japan's registration system for tangible cultural properties, created by amendment to the Law for the Protection of Cultural Properties in 1996, protects buildings more lightly than designation as an Important Cultural Property does. An owner continues to live in or use the building and notifies the authorities before altering its exterior significantly, receiving modest tax relief and repair support in return. It was built for exactly this situation: a private family house of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, still occupied, that no one was going to nominate for National Treasure status but whose loss would thin out a city street.

All three Masui buildings were registered on 28 April 2009 and notified on 14 May, in the 63rd round. The Shoin carries register number 37-0324. What separates it from its neighbours is the criterion cited. The main house and the tea house were both registered as models of design (造形の規範となっているもの), a judgement about the quality and typicality of their form. The Shoin was registered under a different heading: as a building that contributes to the historic landscape of the country (国土の歴史的景観に寄与しているもの).

Read that against the 15-metre frontage and the reasoning becomes clear. This is the building that holds the street. A long tiled roof with a continuous low eave, running the length of half a block, does something for the character of Ōgimachi that no interior detail can do. The criterion is about the outside of the building, not the room within it.

Practical Notes for Visitors

The Shoin is part of a private residence and is not open to the public. There are no visiting hours, no admission charge and no interior access. The Agency for Cultural Affairs record lists no owner name, no managing body and no arrangement for public viewing, and no programme of periodic openings has been announced. The ten-mat room, the toko, the flat writing alcove and the veranda described above are known from the official record rather than from any visitor route.

What can be seen is the long street elevation: the tiled gable roof, the continuous lower eave, and the way the wing continues the line of the main house eastward at 1-58-2 Ōgimachi. View it from the public road, keep quiet, and do not enter the property or try to see over into the garden on the south side. Photographing the exterior from public ground is generally acceptable; avoid pointing a camera into the building or at residents.

JR Shōwachō Station on the Yosan Line is about ten minutes away on foot to the southwest. JR Takamatsu Station lies roughly 1.3 kilometres northeast, around a twenty-minute walk. Ōgimachi is an ordinary working district, not a conservation area, so the wing sits among later buildings without any signage announcing it.

For a shoin interior you can actually enter, Takamatsu has two strong options nearby. Hiunkaku (披雲閣), the former Matsudaira family villa completed in 1917 in what is now Tamamo Park on the Takamatsu Castle site, about 1.7 kilometres east, was designated an Important Cultural Property in 2012 and is a large-scale example of orthodox shoin planning; it operates mainly as a rentable hall, with general viewing during announced periods, so check the city's information before going. Kikugetsutei (掬月亭) in Ritsurin Garden opens 9:00 to 16:30 with last admission at 16:00, charging 800 yen for matcha or 600 yen for sencha with a sweet, on top of garden admission of 500 yen for adults and 170 yen for children. Hours and prices are revised from time to time, so confirm them in advance.