Former Kuroki Kaishundo Clinic

Fifty Years of Consulting Hours Behind a White Facade

The Former Kuroki Kaishundo Clinic (旧黒木回春堂医院, Kyū-Kuroki Kaishundō Iin) is a single-storey wooden clinic building of 1928 standing on the village street at Nagayoshi in Fukiage-cho, Hioki City, Kagoshima Prefecture, and registered as a Registered Tangible Cultural Property on 2 October 2007.

It is small: 52 square metres of floor area under a roof of pantiles, with both gable ends cut back as half-hips. The exterior is painted white, which in a street of grey tile and dark timber is the first thing you register from a distance.

The building went up in the third year of Showa and worked as a doctor's surgery for half a century, closing in 1978. Two generations of patients from Nagayoshi and the surrounding hamlets came through that entrance. Rural Japan had a specific building type for this, the machi-isha's house-and-surgery, and few examples have come down in recognisable condition.

The name repays a moment. Kaishundō (回春堂) combines a word meaning the return of spring, used since classical times as a figure for the recovery of health and vigour, with dō, a hall. It was a conventional name for apothecaries and clinics, and reads to a Japanese eye roughly as a Western ear takes Apothecary Hall. Kuroki is the family name of the doctor.

Registered for the Street, Not for the Building Alone

Registered Tangible Cultural Property status is granted under one of three criteria, and the Kuroki clinic was taken under the third: that the building 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). This is a statement about context. What is protected here is a small structure holding its place in a village street, rather than an isolated architectural set piece.

The wall treatment is the piece of design to look at closely. The carpenter divided each elevation horizontally. Across the middle band, at the height of the door heads, the wall is clad in overlapping horizontal weatherboarding, and tall vertical sash windows are set into it all the way round. Above and below that band the boarding turns vertical. The change of direction gives the small facade a base, a middle and a top, which is a lot of articulation for a building of this size.

Western detail is applied where it shows. The transom above the entrance carries decorative work in a Western idiom, and the brackets under the eaves are cut and shaped rather than left plain. The register describes the effect as elegant, and the word fits: this is a country carpenter working carefully in a borrowed vocabulary, with none of the heaviness that Western-style detail could acquire in less skilled hands.

Behind the Western surface the construction is Japanese timber framing, done in the ordinary way of the region. The combination was standard for small medical and commercial buildings of the Taisho and early Showa decades: a modern-looking front for a modern-looking profession, carried on the joinery the local trade already knew.

Nagayoshi: A Samurai Village That Came from Sadowara

The street the clinic stands on has a longer history than the building. Nagayoshi was a fumoto, one of the dispersed rural settlements through which the Satsuma domain quartered its unusually large samurai class across the countryside instead of concentrating it in a single castle town. Each fumoto had its administrative office, its residences and its temples.

This particular one was created after 1600. Shimazu Toyohisa, lord of Sadowara in Hyuga, died at Sekigahara covering the retreat of his uncle Shimazu Yoshihiro in the episode Japanese accounts call the Shimazu withdrawal. Sadowara was confiscated in the settlement that followed, and Toyohisa's surviving retainers were resettled at Nagayoshi, where the Nagayoshi branch of the Shimazu was established with his father Iehisa counted as first head and Toyohisa as second.

Both graves are here. Toyohisa and the later heads of the line lie at the site of Tenshōji, a temple now gone, and Iehisa at the site of Baitenji nearby. Local volunteers keep the grounds. A visitor with an afternoon can walk the clinic street, the two temple sites and the ruins of Nangō castle without needing to drive between them.

The clinic itself is privately owned and the interior is closed. Viewing is from the street, which is consistent with the reason it was registered. There is no signage in English and no visitor parking attached to the building.

Nagayoshi sits inland from Fukiagehama, the long dune-backed beach on the East China Sea coast that ranks among the largest sand beaches in Japan. The nearest railway station is Ijuin on the JR Kagoshima Main Line, roughly twenty minutes away by car; bus services into Nagayoshi exist but run infrequently, and published timetables for this area go out of date quickly, so check before relying on them.