Izumi Family Main Building

A House Rebuilt After the Sea Came In

At 4:19 on the morning of December 21, 1946, the Showa Nankai earthquake broke loose off the Kii Peninsula and shook the Pacific coast of Shikoku. In the fishing town of Usa, set on a low neck of land at the mouth of Uranouchi Bay in what is now Tosa City, the ground heaved, houses folded, and a tsunami pushed in from the sea. Local records count 151 homes collapsed and 341 swept away in the wider Tosa City area, with Usa at the center of the destruction. The Izumi family home was one of the buildings that came down.

What stands on the plot today is the house the family raised again about a year later, around 1947, on the same north-facing site beside the road. They did not start from a blank sheet. They rebuilt the home they had lost, reproducing the form of the house that had stood there before the quake.

The Main Hall of the Izumi Family Residence (Izumi-ke Jutaku Shuoku) is a two-story timber building, its roof gabled in the kirizuma manner and laid with sangawara pantiles, the ridge running east to west. The plan measures roughly six bays (ken) across the front and three bays deep, about 92 square meters in building area. Walk around to the gable ends and you find the detail that fixes it as a Tosa house: five stepped courses of mizukiri-gawara, narrow tile ledges set into the plaster of the wall.

Why a Postwar Farmhouse Is on the National Register

The house is listed as a Registered Tangible Cultural Property, registration number 39-0163, entered on the national register on November 8, 2004. The category itself is worth a word of explanation for visitors used to hearing about National Treasures and Important Cultural Properties.

Japan created the registration system in 1996 as a lighter counterpart to formal designation. A National Treasure or Important Cultural Property sits under close protection, and changes to it are tightly controlled. Registration works differently. It marks a building as worth keeping, asks owners only to give notice before major alterations, and otherwise leaves them free to go on living in the place. The system was built for the great stock of buildings from the late nineteenth and twentieth centuries that give Japanese towns their familiar texture without meeting the bar for designation. The wording of the criterion the Izumi house was registered under puts the point simply: it contributes to the historic landscape of the country.

Its value, then, is not a matter of great age. A house from about 1947 is young as cultural properties go. What earns it a place is what it represents. This is a building raised in the immediate aftermath of disaster, faithful to the form of its lost predecessor, still carrying the regional craft, the mizukiri-gawara chief among it, that local builders had relied on for generations. The reconstruction is the point.

What to Look For

Begin with the gable walls. The mizukiri-gawara are not decoration in any loose sense. Kochi sits in the path of typhoons and takes some of the heaviest rainfall in Japan, and a plastered wall left bare will not last long under that assault. The answer worked out over generations along this coast was to project thin horizontal ledges of tile from the wall face, so that rain is thrown clear of the plaster below instead of running down it. Five courses on a single gable is a generous count. The same banded look defines the celebrated streets of Kira-gawa further east, where it has earned national protection as a historic district, and seeing it on a single private house gives a sense of how widely the technique once spread.

The second feature is harder to read from outside but central to how the house was used. The whole upper floor is given over to one room: a great hall of twenty tatami mats. In a coastal town, a space of that size on the second story could hold a gathering, a celebration, the rites that mark a family's year. The plan tells you something about how a household of means in postwar Usa expected to live.

One practical point matters before you plan a trip. The Izumi residence is a private home, still owned and lived in, and it is not open to the public. There are no interior tours and no posted opening hours. It can be appreciated only from the public road that runs along its north side, and visitors should respect the privacy of the occupants, keep to the road, and avoid entering the grounds or photographing in a way that intrudes. The reward of a visit is to see the building in its setting, a working house in a working fishing town, rather than a museum piece behind a rope.

Around Usa

Usa repays the visitor who treats the Izumi house as one stop on a coastal day rather than a destination in itself. The town is a katsuo and tuna port wrapped around the mouth of Uranouchi Bay, and the water is its organizing fact.

The most obvious landmark is the Usa Ohashi, a red bridge 645 meters long that vaults the bay mouth to reach the Yokonami Peninsula. It opened in 1973; before that, a ferry made the short crossing, a service said to have run for around twelve centuries. Cross the bridge and you join the Yokonami Kuroshio Line, a ridge road with open sea on one side and the calm inner bay on the other.

At the far end of that drive stands Shoryu-ji, the thirty-sixth temple on the Shikoku pilgrimage of eighty-eight sacred sites, founded in connection with the monk Kukai. Its main hall is reached by a steep flight of around 170 stone steps, the same steps on which the sumo champion who took the ring name Asashoryu is said to have trained as a schoolboy. Back on the Usa side, Usa Shiokaze Park sits at the bay entrance with an ocean-view cafe and seasonal whale-watching cruises, and a Saturday morning market at the fish market sells the night's catch alongside local produce.

For the traveler who has understood why the Izumi house exists, the most resonant nearby site is the simplest. Usa raised a monument to its recovery from the 1946 disaster, a reconstruction memorial that stands in the town. Beside it is a marker passing on hard-won advice about how to act when the sea draws back. The town suffered terribly in the quake yet lost relatively few lives, and local accounts credit the warnings handed down by earlier generations who had lived through earlier waves. The Izumi house, rebuilt in the same years, belongs to that story of a community putting itself back together.