Restaurant Tokugetsuro Main Building

Rebuilt After the Air Raids

Restaurant Tokugetsuro Main Building is a two-storey timber restaurant building in Minamiharimayacho, Kochi City, completed in 1950 and entered on the national register of Registered Tangible Cultural Properties on 8 November 2004. It measures ten bays along the front by six bays deep, with a floor area of 319 square metres.

There was an earlier building here. Air raids on Kochi in July 1945 burned the quarter around Harimaya Bridge, taking with them the premises of a restaurant that had traded since 1870. What stands now is reconstruction work raised on that ground.

The roof is hipped-and-gabled, covered with pantiles. Slightly east of centre on the north face, a gabled carriage porch projects forward to form the entrance. This is the elevation a guest meets on passing through the main gate, the bulk of two storeys above and the low eaves of the porch below.

The architect was Yagyu Wataru, an early member of the Kochi prefectural architects' association who worked locally through the reconstruction years.

The Case for Registration Is Upstairs

Restaurant Tokugetsuro Main Building was registered under the criterion for design that sets a standard, with the registration number 39-0155. The guest room registered on the same day carries 39-0156, the next number in the sequence.

What the assessment turns on is the banquet hall on the upper floor. It seats 80 tatami mats, or 100 counting the surrounding veranda, and the house puts its capacity at about 150 people. A room that size raises an awkward question overhead: a ceiling assembled from short boards breaks the space into pieces the moment anyone looks up.

The hall avoids this by using long boards of Yanase cedar. Yanase, in the mountains of eastern Kochi Prefecture, has long been known for the quality of its timber. Each board runs 10 metres long, 75 centimetres wide and 1.8 centimetres thick, cut as a single piece.

A story attaches to those boards. They were meant to be about 12 metres, but somewhere on the mountain road out there was a turn the load would not take, and roughly 2 metres had to be cut away. It gives some sense of what moving a 10-metre board from forest to city centre involved in the years just after the war.

Registration is not a system for selecting buildings whose value has already been settled. It exists to protect buildings that remain in use, while they stay in use. The main building fits that purpose without strain.

What to Look at in the Hall

If you are shown into the banquet hall of Restaurant Tokugetsuro Main Building, look up first. The boards run in one direction with few joints, so the eye reads the depth of the room in a single sweep. Ten metres is a figure that only becomes real when you are standing under it.

From mid-January the potted plum display fills the edges of the room, pots ranged all around the tatami. The scale of 80 mats is easiest to grasp on those days.

From outside, the carriage porch repays attention. Its gable faces north and steps forward from the wall above. The rest of the building rises two storeys, but this one element meets you at close to human height, so the impression shifts as you approach the door.

Conditions for Visiting

Restaurant Tokugetsuro Main Building belongs to a restaurant that is still trading, and the interior is open to dining guests. Seeing the hall or the tatami rooms means making a reservation. First-time guests without an introduction are accepted, every room is private, and no room charge is added.

Of the exterior, the north entrance and its carriage porch can be seen from just inside the main gate without entering the building, though this means looking in from the gateway rather than walking the grounds.

Photography is not covered on the official website, so anyone hoping to photograph the ceiling should say so when booking. There are steps in the building; the house advises that wheelchairs may enter once the tyres are wiped. Opening hours, closing days and directions are gathered on the Restaurant Tokugetsuro site page.