Kumon Toshiyuki Family Residence Main Building

A Taisho Main House on the Ikedani River

Kumon Toshiyuki-ke Jutaku Shuoku (公文利幸家住宅主屋, also written Kumon Toshiyuki-ke Jūtaku Shuoku), the main house of the Kumon Toshiyuki residence at 532 Tano, Tano Town, Aki District, Kochi Prefecture, was built in the early Taisho era (1912-1925) and was entered on Japan's national register of Tangible Cultural Properties on 1 December 2003. It stands close to the right bank of the Ikedani River, a small watercourse running parallel to the larger Nahari River, and turns its eastern gable end toward the road.

The plan is a square of four ken by four ken, roughly 7.3 metres on each side, giving a registered building area of 64 square metres. One storey, timber-framed, with a gabled roof of sangawara pantiles and a ridge running east to west. Inside, the rooms are arranged on the ta-no-ji grid, a four-room square named after the written character for a rice paddy, which divides the floor into two rooms front and two rooms back.

On the south side there is a shikidai, the low stepped board that marks a formal entrance. The Agency for Cultural Affairs describes it as descending from the house type of the goshi, the rural samurai of the former Tosa domain who held land and status in the countryside rather than in the castle town. A farming household of the Taisho era had no obligation to build one. That the Kumon family did says something about how long the older social vocabulary lingered in this part of Kochi.

Registered as a Model of Its Type

Japan's registration system, introduced in 1996, covers buildings roughly fifty years old or more and works by a lighter touch than the designation system used for National Treasures. Owners keep living in their houses and keep control of them; in exchange they notify the government before altering the exterior. Registered properties are entered under one of three criteria, and the criterion recorded for this building is the first of them: that it serves as a model of design.

That detail repays attention. The Kumon Toshiyuki residence comprises five registered buildings, and the main house is the only one of the five carrying that criterion. The gate and privy, the connecting corridor, the storehouse and the barn were all registered under a different heading, contributing to the historic landscape of the nation. In other words, the four outbuildings were valued largely for what they do to the street; the main house was valued for what it is.

Registration number 39-0081 places it in the thirty-ninth round of registrations. The public notice was issued on 25 December 2003, three weeks after the register entry itself. Tano Town saw an unusually concentrated round that year: twelve family properties totalling thirty buildings went onto the register on the same date, among them the Kawada, Sumida, Arisawa and Fukoe residences. The town is the smallest in Shikoku by area, which makes the density of that listing all the more striking.

Reading the Wall from the Roadside

The feature to look for is the mizukiri-gawara. Where the geya, the low secondary roof skirting the building, meets the wall on the north and south faces, two horizontal courses of small tiles project outward. They are rain-shedding tiles, and they exist because Kochi sits in what Japanese weather reports call typhoon alley. Wind-driven rain that would otherwise run down and soak the plaster is thrown clear of the wall at each course.

Once you have learned to see them, they turn up everywhere along this coast. The barn in the same compound has stacked courses of them. The main house of the Kumon Masaaki residence, a separate registered property a few hundred metres away at 570-1, carries three courses rather than two. The most concentrated display is at Kiragawa in Muroto City, a preservation district selected in 1997 where whole streets of houses wear them.

This is a private home and there is no interior access, no admission desk and no opening hours. What the register protects here is the exterior, and the exterior is what a visitor sees, from the public road, in passing. Photography of the street elevation is ordinarily unproblematic, but the courtesy owed to a family living behind that wall is the real constraint: keep to the road, do not enter the plot, and do not photograph into the garden or through windows.

Tano Station on the Tosa Kuroshio Railway's Gomen-Nahari Line is the practical starting point, about 76 minutes by train from Kochi Station. The station shares a building with the Tano Ekiya roadside station, which rents bicycles, and the town measures only a few kilometres across. Oka Goten, the 1844 merchant mansion that served as the Tosa lord's official lodging and is now a prefecturally designated cultural property, is a seven-minute walk from the station and open from 9:30 to 16:00 with a general admission of 300 yen. Combining the two makes sense: the storehouse in the Kumon compound is said to have come from Oka Goten.