Toshiyuki Kumon's Residence and Toilet

A Gate and a Privy Under One Roof

Kumon Toshiyuki-ke Jutaku Iemon oyobi Benjo (公文利幸家住宅家門及び便所, also written Kumon Toshiyuki-ke Jūtaku Iemon oyobi Benjo), the gate and privy 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 occupies the southeastern corner of the household plot and is joined to the main house by a covered corridor.

The building measures two and a half ken along the ridge by one ken deep, with the ridge running north to south. It is single storey, gabled, roofed in sangawara pantiles, and its registered building area comes to 9.6 square metres. The gate opening itself is 2.9 metres wide.

The division of that small volume is the point. The southern one and a half ken form the gate; the northern one ken, the bay closest to the main house, holds the privy. The Agency for Cultural Affairs notes that combining a privy with a gate in a single structure was uncommon in this district. Most households in rural Kochi built the two apart, since a gate announces a family to the street while a privy is the part of a house nobody announces.

Two Doors for One Small Room

The privy was built to be entered from two directions: from the garden side and from the covered corridor side. That arrangement is the sort of detail that only makes sense once you picture the household using it. Someone working outdoors reaches it without tracking dirt through the house. Someone indoors reaches it under a roof, without stepping into rain, which in a prefecture that receives some of the heaviest annual rainfall in Japan is not a small consideration.

The corridor that makes the second approach possible is itself registered, separately, as Kumon Toshiyuki-ke Jutaku Watariroka. It runs three and a half ken from the eastern end of the main house's lower roof and attaches to the north face of the privy. Its garden side, facing west, has a boarded lower wall with glazed windows above. Its road side, facing east, is finished in the same manner as the gate and privy: sasarako-shitami weatherboarding at the base, with exposed post-and-plaster construction above.

That shared treatment of the east face is deliberate. Gate, privy and corridor read from the road as one continuous wall of a single material and rhythm rather than as three separate outbuildings, and the registration criterion recorded for all three is the same: contributing to the historic landscape of the nation. Where the main house was registered as a model of design, these structures earned their place by what they do to the street.

What a Visitor Actually Sees

Approaching along the road, the gate is the first element of the Kumon compound to meet the eye, and at 2.9 metres it is modest. No towering entrance, no ornamental brackets. What gives it presence is continuity: the gable, the pantiles and the boarded base carry on northward into the corridor and the flank of the main house without interruption, so the whole southeastern edge of the plot presents a single considered elevation.

Look at the lower wall closely. Sasarako-shitami is a weatherboarding technique in which the vertical battens holding the horizontal boards are notched to fit the stepped profile of the boards behind them, producing a slightly serrated shadow line. It is a carpentry solution to wind-driven rain, and it belongs to the same climatic logic as the rain-shedding tiles on the main house a few metres away.

This remains a private residence, occupied and in ordinary daily use. There is no interior access, no admission and no opening hours, and the privy is not a museum exhibit. Viewing is from the public road. Photographing the street elevation is ordinarily unproblematic; entering the plot or aiming a camera into the garden is not appropriate.

The nearest station is Tano on the Tosa Kuroshio Railway's Gomen-Nahari Line, roughly 76 minutes from Kochi Station, with bicycle rental at the adjoining Tano Ekiya roadside station. Tano Town is the smallest municipality in Shikoku by area, and twelve registered family properties totalling thirty buildings were entered on the register here on a single day in December 2003, so an hour on foot or on a bicycle covers a good deal of it.