Former Shigetomi Shimazu Family Villa Main Building

The House the Senior Shimazu Branch Kept in Town

The Former Shigetomi Shimazu Family Villa Main Building (旧重富島津家別邸主屋, Kyū Shigetomi Shimazu-ke Bettei Shuoku) is a single storey wooden residence in Shimizu-chō, Kagoshima City, built in the late Meiji period between 1898 and 1912 and entered on Japan's register of Tangible Cultural Properties on 25 April 2014.

The Shigetomi Shimazu were the ranking house among the Shimazu goichimon, the collateral families placed immediately below the lords of Satsuma. Their fief lay at Shigetomi in Ōsumi, part of present-day Aira City, but the family also kept this property in Kagoshima, on rising ground above Kinkō Bay with Sakurajima across the water. The Agency for Cultural Affairs records the building as timber framed, single storey, tile roofed, with a building area of 289 square metres.

The plan is the part that repays a slow look. Three ranges, the audience chamber (謁見の間, ekken no ma) among them, are set one behind another in a staggered line that Japanese carpentry calls gankō, after the echelon formation of migrating geese. Each range carries its own veranda and a low pent roof, or shitaya, around the outside. Stand in the garden and no single facade takes charge: the eaves step back in sequence, and rooms open onto different stretches of planting rather than a single view. The entrance sits at the east end under a hip-and-gable roof, the irimoya form that in Japan signals rank.

Where the timber came from is a question with a partial answer. The Kagoshima Prefectural Board of Education records that the main building is said to have been relocated to this site around 1906 from a Shimazu main-family villa put up in the early Meiji years in what is now Kimotsuki Town, on the Ōsumi Peninsula. The tradition is transmitted rather than documented, and the national database gives only the broad late-Meiji bracket.

The couple associated with the house are Shimazu Uzuhiko, fourth son of Shimazu Hisamitsu and the man who took over the Shigetomi line when his father returned to the main Shimazu house, and his wife Noriko, fourth daughter of the reforming lord Shimazu Nariakira. Uzuhiko later held the priesthood of Terukuni Shrine and headed the prefectural Chūgaku Zōshikan school. The present operator records that the pair used this property as their main residence after the Meiji Restoration, and that the land had earlier belonged to the Imaizumi Shimazu, the family into which Atsuhime was born.

Registered, Not Designated: What That Means Here

Japan runs two parallel systems for protecting buildings. Designation (shitei) applies to a small number of structures of the first rank and brings tight controls. Registration (tōroku), introduced in 1996, casts a wider net over buildings roughly fifty years old or more, requires the owner only to notify the authorities before substantial alteration, and is written to keep buildings in use rather than freeze them. The Former Shigetomi Shimazu Family Villa Main Building belongs to the second category.

It carries registration number 46-0110 and was taken up in the 77th round of registrations, with notification and registration both dated 25 April 2014. The criterion applied is the first of the three available: contribution to the historical landscape of the country. The stone wall on the same grounds, registration number 46-0111, went through on the same day, and the rice storehouse now called Chōonkan is listed as a related property by the prefecture.

What the assessors singled out was the quality of the interior. The official description points to zashiki-kazari, the formal alcove fittings of a reception room, made up in choice woods including kurogaki, and to the openwork transoms and cedar door panels dividing the rooms. Buildings of this grade rarely survive in domestic use. Many former daimyo residences of the Meiji decades were broken up, moved to museum parks, or lost outright in the 1945 air raids that burned much of central Kagoshima, so a house of this type still standing on its own ground with its fittings in place is uncommon.

What to Look For on a Visit

Kurogaki is black persimmon, and it is the detail worth arriving early for. The wood comes from persimmon trees that have developed dark mineral streaking in the heartwood, a condition that cannot be induced and appears in only a small fraction of felled trees. Cabinetmakers cut it thin and set it where the pattern reads: shelf boards, alcove posts, the framing of a chigaidana staggered shelf. No two panels match, and the grain in this house was chosen piece by piece.

Above the sliding partitions run the ranma, transom panels carved through so that air and light pass between rooms. Cedar door panels, sugido, close off other openings. Both belong to a vocabulary of quiet display: nothing shouts, and the expense sits in material and joinery rather than in scale or colour.

The building went through refurbishment in 2005, a date the national database carries alongside the original construction period, and reopened in 2006 as Manor House Shimazu Shigetomisō. The interior work of that conversion was led by the designer Sugimoto Takashi. One room, the Tono-no-ma, is described by the operator as the chamber Uzuhiko occupied; a hanging scroll attributed to Hisamitsu and calligraphy by Shimazu Narinobu, the 26th head of the house, are shown there.

Outside, the grounds run to roughly 4,000 tsubo, something over 13,000 square metres, with a waterfall and planting that changes through the year. The operator notes that the site was used for location filming of the 1967 James Bond picture You Only Live Twice.

Practical matters need stating plainly, because they shape any visit. This is private property in commercial use, and there is no general admission ticket. Access comes through the French restaurant AUTOMNE, which takes bookings by telephone for lunch between 11:30 and 14:30 and dinner between 18:00 and 21:30 and closes on Tuesdays and Wednesdays outside public holidays, or through Café du Marié, open 11:30 to 16:00 on Mondays, Thursdays and Fridays. Weddings and private functions run on other days, and rooms in use are not open to passing visitors. A taxi takes about five minutes from JR Kagoshima Station, about fifteen from the east exit of Kagoshima-Chūō Station, and about ten from the Tenmonkan district. Photography of the building and garden is generally tolerated, but ask staff before photographing interiors, and expect restrictions when another party is in the house.