Ichijo Inn Wooden Main Building

Ichijo Ryokan Wooden Main Building: A Cedar Inn Above Kamasaki Onsen

In the foothills southwest of Sendai, where the Zaō range begins to rise, one hot-spring village still sits at the end of the road. Kamasaki Onsen has been pouring out its waters since 1428, when, according to local tradition, a villager from Shiroishi struck a rock with the tip of a sickle and unleashed a spring. Edo-period travel guides ranked Kamasaki among Japan's first-tier therapeutic baths — "Kamasaki for wounds, Obara for the eyes," as the saying went. At the very back of the village stands a three-story wooden inn completed in 1941: the Wooden Main Building of Ichijo Ryokan, registered as a National Tangible Cultural Property in August 2016.

A Building Born of Disaster

The structure visitors see today owes its existence to a catastrophe. In the summer of 1937, torrential rains overwhelmed the Shiroishi River basin and damaged the inn that had stood on this site. Rather than patch the surviving fabric, the Ichijo family — twenty generations into running the spring — chose to rebuild from the foundations. They engaged miyadaiku, the carpenters who specialize in shrine and temple construction, and brought cedar down from forests the family itself owned. Construction took four years. The new main building was completed in 1941, the same year the Pacific War began.

According to the inn, the structure was assembled almost entirely through traditional joinery rather than nails — tenons, mortises, and the interlocking cuts known as shiguchi. Even by 1941, the skill required for such work belonged to a vanishing handful of practitioners. The Agency for Cultural Affairs notes a particularly unusual feature in its registration description: more than half of the principal columns run unbroken from the basement floor through the third story. This structural choice, known as tōshibashira, simplifies how seismic forces travel through the building.

Why It Was Registered

Japan's registered cultural property system recognizes buildings under one of three criteria: contribution to historical landscape, exemplary craftsmanship, or difficulty of recreation. The Wooden Main Building was registered on the second criterion — its embodiment of a particular architectural type. Corridors wrap all four sides of every floor, with high railings (kōran) running along the outside and wooden fittings framing the openings inward. Inside, ten guest rooms in three different tatami sizes — eight-mat, six-mat, and four-and-a-half-mat — fold into the spatial grid. This is the classical layout of a Japanese therapeutic-bath inn, executed at a moment when such inns were already becoming rare.

The registration number is 04-0123. The main building was registered together with two other structures on the same property: the Yumukai annex and the earthen storehouse (dozō). For a single onsen village to retain three connected components of one ryokan complex is unusual in northeastern Japan.

What to Look For

The first thing most visitors notice is the height of the ceilings. Inns built for long-stay therapeutic guests needed to release heat and let damp clothing dry, and this building was designed accordingly. Step into one of the perimeter corridors and the wooden fittings remain almost entirely original. The window glass dates from the prewar era and was made by hand-blowing, which leaves a slight ripple across the surface — landscapes outside seem to drift slowly as you walk past. Most renovations replace such glass with modern panes; here, it has been deliberately preserved.

The structural showpiece is the through-pillars. According to the heritage registration description, more than half of the principal vertical supports run uninterrupted from basement to third floor — a configuration that is unusual in three-story wooden buildings of this scale. The cedar was selected from knot-free sections of the family's forest, and a close look at the grain reveals how carefully each pillar was chosen.

The Main Building is no longer used as guest lodging. Since the full renovation of 2008, each of its ten rooms has been converted into a private dining suite, operating as the in-house restaurant "Shōan." Guests of the ryokan, and patrons who book the restaurant separately, encounter the building through long, multi-course meals served in these rooms. The choice to repurpose rather than retire the structure has secured the funds for its continued maintenance.

The Ichijo Family and Kamasaki Onsen

The Ichijo family's own records trace their origin to Kyoto's noble households. According to family tradition, a sixteenth-century ancestor served the warlord Imagawa Yoshimoto and, after Yoshimoto's defeat at the Battle of Okehazama in 1560, retreated north. The Kamasaki spring had been damaged by flooding and was lying dormant; this ancestor, recognizing its value, invested his own resources in reviving it. When the Sendai domain consolidated its rule, the family was granted the official position of yumori — keeper of the hot spring — a role that has now passed through twenty generations.

The spring's reputation reached its peak during the Edo period, when commercial "ranking sheets" of Japanese hot springs placed Kamasaki near the top. Date Masamune, the founder of the Sendai domain, and his senior retainer Katakura Kojūrō are both said to have bathed here, though documentation for the individual visits is traditional rather than archival. The therapeutic-bath culture that sustained the inn for centuries faded in the late twentieth century, and the current twentieth-generation head repositioned Ichijo as a higher-end ryokan in the early 2000s — saving the Main Building from demolition by giving it a new role as the dining venue.

Visiting Kamasaki and the Surrounding Area

The Wooden Main Building is privately owned and is not open to general sightseeing. To experience the interior, you will need to stay at Yunushi Ichijo or book a meal at its in-house restaurant. The exterior can be seen by walking through the upper end of Kamasaki's small village. In the early evening, when interior lighting reaches through the perimeter corridors, the wooden lattice silhouettes against the dusk; the view is best appreciated from the road that runs between the main building and the newer annex.

For travelers in the area, the city of Shiroishi rewards a half-day visit. Shiroishi Castle, the seat of the Katakura family under the Sendai domain, was reconstructed in wood in 1995 using traditional methods and offers some of the best castle craftsmanship of recent decades. The local specialty noodle shiroishi umen is served in restaurants near the castle, and several traditional washi paper workshops continue to operate in the region. The Zaō mountain range to the west is reachable by car in about thirty minutes, with mountain shrines such as Kattamine Jinja, alpine routes in summer, and ski areas in winter.

From Tokyo, the Tōhoku Shinkansen reaches Shiroishi-Zaō Station in roughly ninety minutes; from Sendai, around fifteen. A shuttle service from the inn covers the final fifteen-minute drive into the hills. Rooms in the newer annex that face east have an unobstructed view of the wooden façade across the road, and arrivals at dusk catch the building in its most photographed mood.