Former Shimazu Yoshino Forestry Office

A Forestry Office That Moved House

The Former Shimazu Family Yoshino Forestry Office (旧島津家吉野殖林所, also written Kyū-Shimazu-ke Yoshino Shokurinjo) is a single-storey timber building of 1909 standing at 9688-24 Yoshino-chō, Kagoshima City, Kagoshima Prefecture, listed as a Registered Tangible Cultural Property on 23 August 1999. It was built several kilometres away in the former village of Yoshida, moved to its present site beside the Iso road in 1986, and now trades under the name Iso Kōgeikan as the gallery shop of Shimadzu Satsuma Kiriko.

The plan covers about 178 square metres under a hipped roof of tile. A veranda runs across the front. That much would be unremarkable for a Meiji-period office in Western dress.

The porch is where the building stops behaving itself.

Instead of the flat or gabled canopy a Western-style building would take, the entrance carries a gable with a mukuri roof, a profile that curves gently upward in convex section rather than dipping in the concave sori familiar from temple eaves. Beneath the gable hangs a gegyo, the carved pendant that normally decorates a shrine or temple bargeboard. Two posts are tied by a kōryō, an arched tie beam, and seated on it is a kaerumata, the frog-leg strut of traditional carpentry, carved with the maru-jū crest: a cross inside a circle, the mark of the Shimazu. A visitor who spends thirty seconds on the porch has read the entire cultural argument of Meiji architecture in Kagoshima.

The names of the men responsible are recorded, which is unusual for a working building of this rank. Kumamoto Chōei drew it; Maruta Jūbei built it.

Inside, the arrangement has been adapted for retail. A storeroom survives on the right-hand side; the rest was opened into a single space, white-walled, where cut glass sits on shelves under the light from the veranda windows.

Why the Building Was Registered

Registration on 23 August 1999 under number 46-0006 placed the building among the earliest entries from Kagoshima Prefecture in a system then only three years old. The official gazette notice followed on 7 September. The criterion applied was that the work establishes a standard of design.

The judgement rests on the exterior. Distinctive veranda treatment and an unusual porch, both surviving in something close to their original condition after the move, carry the case. Relocated buildings occupy an awkward position in heritage thinking, since a structure separated from its site loses part of its meaning. Here the survival of the fabric and the rarity of the detailing outweighed the change of address.

The original purpose deserves a word. Shokurin means afforestation. The Shimazu family ran planting operations across an area stretching from Yoshino village into Yoshida village, in the hills north of Kagoshima, and this was the office that administered them. Satsuma had no coal. Timber supplied fuel for the domain's furnaces, kilns, and glass works, and the family's interest in growing it systematically ran back into the nineteenth century. A forestry office was infrastructure, not decoration.

The building's second career connects to the same industrial story from the other end. Satsuma Kiriko, the heavy coloured cut glass developed under the twenty-eighth head of the Shimazu house, Shimazu Nariakira, in the 1850s, went out of production within about two decades. Shimadzu Limited revived it in the 1980s using documentary sources, and the workshop and its shop were established at Iso. The forestry office was moved down to the coast in 1986 to house the sales gallery. A building put up to manage the domain's timber now sells the glass the domain invented.

Visiting

Iso Kōgeikan opens daily from 9:00 to 17:00 and closes only for bad weather or unforeseen circumstances. Entry to the gallery shop itself does not require a ticket, which sets it apart from the paid attractions around it. The telephone number is 099-247-8490.

The glass workshop next door can be looked into, and watching a craftsman cut through the coloured overlay to the clear glass beneath explains the technique better than any label. The gradient effect the Japanese call bokashi comes from the depth of the cut, not from any dye. Viewing of the workshop is generally not available on Mondays, the third Sunday of the month, or over the New Year period, so check before making a special trip.

Everything else here is within a few minutes' walk. Shōko Shūseikan, the stone machine factory of 1865 that is an Important Cultural Property and a component of the World Heritage property Sites of Japan's Meiji Industrial Revolution, stands immediately alongside. Sengan-en, the Shimazu villa garden laid out in 1658 with Sakurajima borrowed as its centrepiece, adjoins it. Admission covering Sengan-en, Shōko Shūseikan, and the villa residence is charged separately.

From Kagoshima-Chūō Station the Kagoshima City View sightseeing bus reaches the Sengan-en stop in roughly half an hour, and regular route buses along the coast road serve the same area. Drivers will find paid parking at Sengan-en.

Stand back across the road before going in. The white building reads oddly against the traffic of the Iso highway, and that is the point: it was never meant to be here at all.