Yamasu Sakashita Family Residence Western-Style Building

Twenty-Seven Square Metres of Ambition

The Yamasu Sakashita Family Residence Western-Style Building (やます坂下家住宅洋館, Yamasu Sakashita-ke Jūtaku Yōkan) is a two-storey timber annex at Sakanoyama in Shodoshima Town, Shozu District, Kagawa Prefecture, completed in 1922 and entered on Japan's national register of Tangible Cultural Properties on 9 February 2005.

Its footprint is 27 square metres. That is smaller than a generous living room, and it is the smallest of the three registered buildings on the plot. The main house next to it covers 131 square metres and the gatehouse 111. Yet the annex is the one the Agency for Cultural Affairs singles out as a landmark for the district, because what it lacks in ground area it recovers in height.

The building measures about four metres along its ridge and six across, sits on an east-west axis, and attaches directly to the west end of the main house. Two full storeys rise from that small base, capped by a steeply pitched gable. The proportions are vertical in a hamlet where almost everything else is long and low, and the Japanese record describes the resulting form with the phrase tachi no takai, meaning tall in its bearing.

The Green Roof

The tiles are the detail people remember. They are French pantiles, glazed green, and they cover a gable considerably steeper than the pitch used on the tiled roofs around it.

French pantiles reached Japan in the Meiji period as part of the wider import of European building technique. Unlike the traditional sangawara pantile, which is laid in overlapping curved courses, the French tile interlocks with its neighbours along moulded channels, which allows a steeper pitch and a flatter, more mechanical surface. Manufacture began domestically before long, and by the Taishō era Japanese kilns were producing them in colours, green among them. On this island of grey and black roofs, a green roof was a decision, not a default.

The walls are finished in mortar render, the standard exterior treatment for small Japanese Western-style buildings of the period, cheaper and faster than masonry while reading as masonry from a distance. Inside, the record notes joinery and a ceiling centrepiece worked in Western idiom. A ceiling rose in a room this size is a deliberate gesture. It belongs to the vocabulary of a European drawing room, scaled down and set into a Japanese merchant's house on a Setouchi island.

Nothing about the annex reads as an experiment in fusion. It is a small, complete Western room grafted onto the end of a thoroughly Japanese house, and the seam is left visible.

Why a Soy Sauce Family Built a Western Room in 1922

Shodoshima's brewing trade had been running for three centuries by the time this annex went up, and the decades on either side of 1900 were its most profitable. Salt-making, introduced by settlers from Akō in the late sixteenth century, had given way to soy sauce, and at the peak the island supported several hundred brewing houses. The families who ran them built accordingly. The stretch of coast between Yasuda and Sakate, now presented as Hishio no Sato, holds not only the fermentation sheds but the homes the trade paid for.

Adding a small Western wing to a Japanese house was, by the Taishō era, an established way of signalling that a family had arrived. The room typically served as a reception space for outside business, kept apart from the domestic interior, furnished with chairs rather than floor cushions. Similar annexes survive across the island's registered buildings, including one at the Yamasan soy sauce compound in the neighbouring hamlet.

The Sakashita compound was assembled in three phases across fourteen years. The gatehouse came first, in 1908. The main house followed in 1917, single-storey, timber, its exterior walls finished in black plaster with the structural posts left exposed. The annex arrived in 1922. Set that sequence beside the wider history and the reading is straightforward: a family building steadily through the trade's best years, and closing with the piece that announced itself furthest.

The name carries its own information. Yamasu is a yagō, the house mark merchant families used as a trading identity, prefixed to the surname Sakashita. The registered buildings on this hillside are full of the same construction: Kikkoishi Ishii, Yamayoshi Yamamoto, Kinryō Fujii, Shōkin Fujii. Each pairing names a brewing house.

What the Registration Recognises

The annex holds registration number 37-0251 and was processed in the forty-fifth round, gazetted on 28 February 2005. The criterion applied is contribution to the historic landscape of the nation, the same as for the gatehouse, and it fits the case unusually well. The Agency's own description ends by noting that the building's tall form stands out and has become a landmark for the locality. A building can be registered for being conspicuous, and this one was.

Registration is the lighter of Japan's two protective systems. Introduced in 1996, it asks owners to notify the state of alterations rather than seek permission, offers tax relief and technical guidance, and assumes the building stays in use. The main house on the same plot was registered under a different criterion, that of being a model of design, which reflects a different kind of value: the main house is judged on its craftsmanship, the annex and the gatehouse on what they contribute to the view.

All three were registered on the same day. Taken together they document how a provincial brewing family housed itself, and they are more informative as a group than any one of them would be alone.

Finding It Without Trespassing

The compound is a private home and none of it is open to the public. There is no admission, no seasonal opening, and no interior access to the annex or to any other building on the plot. Its value to a visitor is entirely external, which in this case is less of a loss than usual: the green roof and the tall gable are exactly what the building was built to be seen for, and both read clearly from the public lane.

Take the Olive Bus Sakate line to Marukin-mae (丸金前), the stop beside the Marukin Soy Sauce Museum, and walk inland and uphill for about a kilometre, fifteen to twenty minutes. The signed Umaki walking trail (馬木散策路) runs through the same hamlet and is the natural route. The trail links several working breweries, and guided walks along it can be arranged in advance through local operators, though those cover the breweries rather than this house.

Photography from the road is not restricted. Keep off the private approach, stay out of the courtyard, and do not photograph through windows. If you want an interior of comparable date that you can actually enter, the Marukin Soy Sauce Museum ten minutes downhill occupies a former pressing plant of the early Taishō era, registered in 1996, generally open 9:00 to 16:00 with an admission charge and seasonal extensions. Confirm hours before travelling.

One point of caution for anyone checking the address. The Agency for Cultural Affairs database records the location under Nōma, while the Kagawa prefectural list records the same plot number under Umaki. The mapped position falls within the Umaki walking trail area.