Kubo Kimono Store Store and Main Building

A Draper's Shop on the Corner

Kubo Gofukuten Tenpo-ken Shuoku (久保呉服店店舗兼主屋, the Kubo Draper's Shop and Main House) is a single-storey wooden building at Ōaza Yasuda 1849 in Yasuda Town, Aki District, Kochi Prefecture, built during the Taishō era between 1912 and 1925 and entered on the national register of Tangible Cultural Properties on 2 October 2007.

A gofukuten deals in kimono cloth. The trade wants a wide, shallow, well-lit room where bolts of fabric can be unrolled across matting for a customer to judge the pattern, and it wants that room open to the street. Kubo Gofukuten was built to that brief.

The building occupies a corner near the middle of the old town and faces east. It measures six ken along the eaves and four and a half ken in depth, roughly eleven metres by eight, covering 86 square metres. The roof is gabled and laid with pantiles. Because it is single-storey throughout, and because most of its neighbours on the street are two, it sits lower than the buildings around it, and the corner opens out.

The plan divides cleanly in two. The northern portion is the shop, four ken wide at the front, which is nearly the whole street frontage. The southern portion is the family's living space: a six-mat formal room with a decorative alcove, and beside it a four-and-a-half-mat anteroom. A veranda runs along the southern edge of these rooms, facing a garden at the back of the plot.

The arrangement is worth reading as a diagram of a merchant family's day. Trade at the north end, against the street. Reception at the south end, against the garden. The alcove in the formal room says that customers of a certain standing were entertained here rather than at the counter.

Vertical Boards on the Gable Side

The registration assessment singles out one feature above the others: the gable-end elevation, sheathed in vertical boarding, which preserves the look of the older town.

This deserves unpacking, because vertical board cladding is not a decorative choice. Along the Pacific coast of eastern Kochi, salt-laden wind and driving rain attack any wall surface. Plaster needs constant maintenance. Vertical boards shed water downward along the grain and can be replaced one plank at a time when a section rots. Cedar and cypress from the Yanase forests inland, some of the best timber in western Japan, were available and cheap. The result was a coastal vernacular of dark boarded walls set against white plaster and grey tile.

Yasuda has enough of these buildings left standing together that the effect survives at the scale of a street rather than a single house. On a corner plot the gable end is fully exposed to view from two directions, and Kubo Gofukuten's boarded flank is one of the most visible examples in town.

The registration criterion applied was the one covering structures that contribute to the historical landscape of the country. In a town like this, that criterion is doing real work. No single building here would carry a designation on its own merits; together they hold the shape of a Meiji and Taishō trading street.

The Street It Belongs To

Yasuda registered an unusual number of buildings in a short span of time. Between July 2007 and February 2012, more than twenty-five structures in the town were placed on the national register, spread across thirteen family compounds and institutions.

Several went on the register the same day as Kubo Gofukuten. The Nishioka draper's shop, a competitor in the same trade, was listed on 2 October 2007, as was the Nishioka family residence with its main house, detached wing, storehouse and gated wall. So was Kubo-ke Jūtaku, the Kubo family residence, comprising a detached wing, a storehouse, a gate and two lengths of wall. Two months later the Minami and Kawada shop-houses, the Jōkōji temple study hall and gate, the Toyonaga dyer's storehouse and earthen wall, and the stone balustrade of Yasuda Hachiman Shrine followed.

What that list describes is a complete small commercial town: drapers, general merchants, a dyer, a temple, a shrine. The Kubo shop is one thread in it.

Yasuda grew on the old coast road along the lower Yasuda River, which runs down from the Umaji mountains without a dam anywhere on it. The valley supplied timber and the charcoal known as Tosa binchōtan; the river supplied sweetfish; the coast road supplied the traffic. The town also produced the Confucian scholar Okamoto Neiho, born at Jōkōji, whose pupils are said to have numbered in the thousands and to have included figures active in the closing years of the shogunate.

Visiting Yasuda's Old Town

Kubo Gofukuten Tenpo-ken Shuoku is privately owned. There is no interior access, no admission and no visitor facility, and the building should be looked at from the public street. Photographing the exterior from the road is fine; entering the plot or photographing into the interior is not.

The practical base for a walk is the Yasuda Machinami Kōryūkan Nagomi, the town's heritage visitor centre. It occupies two adjoining registered buildings: the former Kashiwabara residence, a Taishō to early Shōwa house in the eastern Tosa manner built with Yanase timber, and the former Ichikawa Clinic, a Western-styled surgery of the Taishō years connected to it through an earth-floored passage. Both families gave their buildings to the town in 2008; restoration ran through 2009 and 2010 and the centre opened in 2010, with the buildings registered in February 2012. It runs changing exhibitions on figures from the town and the surrounding area, and staff can explain which buildings on the street carry listings.

Yasuda Station on the Tosa Kuroshio Railway Gomen-Nahari Line puts the old town within an easy walk, and the line itself is worth taking for the elevated coastal views. Drivers come along National Route 55.

The town rewards an hour or two on foot rather than a targeted visit to one address. Walk the main street, look at the corners, and count the boarded gables. Beyond the old town, the Yasuda River is a well-known river for sweetfish angling in season, Kōnomineji, the twenty-seventh temple of the Shikoku pilgrimage, stands on the mountainside above with the Pacific in view, and the hydrangeas at Fudō-no-taki come out in June.