Sudo Family Residence Main Building

A Plain House from 1932, and What It Records

The Sudō Family Residence Main House (須藤家住宅主屋, Sudō-ke Jūtaku Omoya, also written Sudo-ke Jutaku Omoya) is a two-storey wooden house at 2132 Shinjuku 2-chōme in Zushi, Kanagawa Prefecture, built in 1932 and entered on Japan's national register of Tangible Cultural Properties on 17 February 2022 under register number 14-0308. It remains a private home and is not open to visitors.

The house stands a short distance inland from Zushi Beach. Its building area is 138 square metres, the roof is slate, and the elevations are deliberately quiet: shallow eaves, and window hoods run in an unbroken horizontal line across the wall. The Agency for Cultural Affairs calls the design heimei, plain and clear, which in the vocabulary of Japanese architectural assessment is a compliment rather than a shrug.

Inside, the plan repays attention. The entrance is on the east, and a central corridor runs through the building. A Western-style reception room sits beside the entrance; along the south front, at the centre, a pair of connected tatami rooms opens onto a wide veranda facing the garden; a Western-style study occupies the south-west corner. Upstairs, a Western room and a Japanese room sit side by side, east and west.

That combination is the whole story of middle-class Japanese housing between the wars, compressed into 138 square metres. The central-corridor plan came out of the housing reform movement of the Taishō period, which argued that giving every room independent access from a corridor was more rational and more hygienic than the older arrangement of rooms opening into one another. Yet the south front here keeps the old form: connected tatami rooms and a broad veranda, oriented to the garden, exactly as a nineteenth-century house would have been. The Sudō house did not choose between the two systems. It ran them at once, which is what most Japanese families actually did.

The Small Building Behind the House

A second structure on the property was registered on the same day, and it is the more unexpected of the two. The Former Boiler Room of the Sudō Family Residence (須藤家住宅旧ボイラー室, register number 14-0309) is a single-storey wooden shed of 8.8 square metres, built around 1946, with a gabled iron-sheet roof, a doorway on the south, clerestory windows on three sides and clapboard walls. Inside, a boiler and a hot-water tank stood at the west end and a coal store at the east.

It was put up by GHQ, the Allied occupation authority, after the Sudō house was requisitioned as accommodation. Zushi sits between Yokosuka and Kamakura, and the concentration of naval facilities at Yokosuka meant that this stretch of coast saw substantial requisitioning of private houses for the use of occupation personnel and their families. American domestic expectations included hot running water; a Japanese house of 1932 did not supply it. So a boiler shed appeared in the back garden.

Eight point eight square metres of coal store is not architecture in any grand sense. It is evidence. The Agency for Cultural Affairs entry describes it simply as a building that carries the history of the postwar years, and registering it alongside the main house was a decision to keep the awkward part of the record attached to the graceful part.

Not Open to Visitors, and Where to Go Instead

Zushi City states the position without ambiguity for both buildings: viewing is not possible. The register lists no owner for the main house, and the property is in private hands. There are no open days, no reservation system and no exterior tours. Standing outside a private residence to photograph it is not a welcome activity, and this article does not encourage it.

The significance of the Sudō house is documentary. It survives as a dated, registered, and unusually complete example of what an ordinary well-built house looked like in a Japanese coastal suburb in 1932, together with the physical trace of what happened to such houses after 1945. Its value sits in the record rather than in the visit.

Zushi does offer an accessible equivalent, and it is a good one. The Former Wakimura Residence Main House (旧脇村家住宅主屋), registered in 2010, stands inside Roka Memorial Park in Sakurayama, about twenty minutes on foot from JR Zushi Station or a short bus ride to the Fujimibashi stop. Built in 1934 for Fujise Hideko, wife of the Mitsui Bussan executive Fujise Masajirō, and designed and built by Shimizu-gumi, it later became the home of the economist Wakimura Yotarō. The exterior can be seen year-round as part of the public park. Since 2017 the city has opened the interior for a single day each year, usually in late winter; the 2026 opening ran on 28 February and drew more than three hundred people. Dates are announced by the city's parks section, so check before travelling.

Knowing the wider picture helps when planning. Zushi holds eight registered buildings, and the great majority stay closed: the Nagashima residence of around 1900, the Former Shōriki Villa complex of main house, storehouse and front gate registered in 2022, and the Former Honda Residence Main House of 1938, designed by Kume Gonkurō using his patented earthquake-resistant timber frame. Read together they describe a town that turned from a Meiji villa resort into a prewar commuter suburb, and the Sudō house belongs to the second half of that sentence. For a coastal registered building in this region that you can actually walk into, the Former Kinoshita Family Villa in Ōiso, now a restaurant, is the nearest reliable option.