Suenobu Family Residence (Former Suenobudo Clinic) Main House

What Is the Suenobu Family Residence Main House?

The Suenobu Family Residence (Former Suenobudo Clinic) Main House is a Western-style clinic and family home built in 1927 in Wajiki, Geisei Village, Kochi Prefecture, and registered as a Registered Tangible Cultural Property of Japan on October 14, 1999. Its Japanese name is 末延家住宅（旧末延堂医院）主屋 (Suenobu-ke Jūtaku, Kyū Suenobudō Iin, Shuoku), and it is the centerpiece of the four registered buildings on the property.

The house is a two-story timber structure with a tiled roof and a building area of 160 square meters. Its walls are finished in Shitami-itabari, overlapping horizontal weatherboards. Consulting rooms and living quarters shared the one building, and according to a village walking map it served as a hospital until 1963.

Why It Was Registered

Of the four buildings at the Suenobu Family Residence, only the main house was registered under the criterion of "serving as a model of design." The gate, kitchen wing and storehouse were listed for their contribution to the historic landscape, a different kind of value. The national database also classifies the main house under culture and welfare rather than housing, treating it first as a medical building.

The official description singles out two things. The first is the roof: a hipped roof running east to west, cut off at both ends so that each end shows a triangular gable wall capped by a small hipped slope. This clipped profile, close to a half-hipped roof, gives the building its Western look. The second is the set of Mochiokuri brackets on the gable ends, whose design the Agency for Cultural Affairs considers a clear expression of the late 1920s.

A rural doctor building a Western-style practice fused with his home in the early Showa era: that is what the Suenobu Family Residence Main House was registered to represent.

What to Look For: Two Front Doors

The plan of the Suenobu Family Residence Main House has two entrances. The family door is on the east side, facing the nagayamon gate. The clinic door is on the south side, set in a projecting wing under its own gable roof. Family and visitors came through the old-style gate on the east; patients used a separate clinic gate to the south.

You can read the division in the roofline. The clipped hip of the main block and the plain gable of the clinic wing give the house two distinct faces.

Look up at the gable ends and you will see the brackets under the eaves, arm-like pieces that carry the roof overhang and double as ornament. They also show up clearly beneath the bargeboards in the Agency for Cultural Affairs' record photographs.

Visiting the Main House

The Suenobu Family Residence (Former Suenobudo Clinic) Main House is a private home. The interior is not open and the grounds cannot be entered, so viewing is from outside only. Because the house stands behind the nagayamon, what you see from the prefectural road is the upper floor and the clipped roof rising above the gate.

The south clinic entrance lies beyond the concrete wall that runs south from the gate toward the clinic gate. If you take photographs, do so from the road without blocking traffic or disturbing the residents. Directions to the property and details of the village's guided walks are on the Suenobu Family Residence group page.