Sanjido Sasaki Store and Residence

A Taisho Shop-House on Yokamachi Street

Sanjido Sasaki Store and Residence (三事堂ささ木店舗及び住宅, also written Sanjidō Sasaki) is a two-storey timber shop-house at 2-3-27 Yokamachi in Kesennuma City, Miyagi Prefecture, built in the middle of the Taisho era (1912-1925) and entered on Japan's register of Tangible Cultural Properties on 2 March 2006 under registration number 04-0053.

The business is older than the building it occupies. Sasaki has dealt in ceramics and lacquerware on this street since 1908, and the shelves inside still carry Bizen, Karatsu and Mino wares along with studio glass. A customer walking in to buy a rice bowl is walking into a registered cultural property, which is an unusual arrangement even in Japan.

Kesennuma is a fishing port, and Yokamachi sits in the Uchiwan district, the sheltered inner bay where boats once waited out bad weather. Local usage still calls the quarter Kazamachi, meaning waiting for the wind. Merchants clustered here because cargo and crews passed through, and the shopfronts that survive give some sense of what that commerce looked like a century ago.

Very little of pre-1929 Kesennuma survives. A fire in the fourth year of Showa swept the town centre, and the buildings that escaped it can be counted without much effort. This one did.

Why the Building Was Registered

Japan's registration system, introduced in 1996, works differently from the designation system that produces National Treasures and Important Cultural Properties. Registration is lighter: it protects buildings roughly fifty years old or more that contribute to the historic character of their surroundings, while leaving owners free to keep using and adapting them. Sanjido Sasaki was accepted under the criterion covering contribution to the historic landscape, in the 49th round of registrations, with the public notice issued on 23 March 2006.

The Agency for Cultural Affairs record describes a shop block of five ken frontage and three ken two shaku depth, roughly 9.1 by 6.1 metres, to which a residential block of three and a half ken depth is attached at the rear. The roof is hipped and clad in sheet iron. Total building area comes to 143 square metres.

What the assessors singled out was the second storey. The ground-floor front has been altered over the years, but the upper windows keep their original treatment: segmental pediments above and moulded sills below, a directly imported piece of Western vocabulary applied to a Japanese merchant house. The glazing bars dividing each sash are described in the official record as technically accomplished, which is a restrained way of saying that someone spent real money on the joinery. White lime plaster runs up the exterior wall to the underside of the second-floor eaves.

Buildings of this kind, half Japanese and half Western, went up across provincial Japan during Taisho. Most were replaced during the postwar decades. In a town that lost its centre twice, once to fire and once to the sea, the survival of a complete example carries weight the architecture alone would not.

What to Look For

Stand across the street first. The upper windows read as a row, and the pediments above them catch the light differently from the flat plaster around them, which is why the facade looks more elaborate than its modest width would suggest. Look up to the ridge: small ornamental finials known as giboshu, the onion-shaped forms more often seen on bridge posts and temple railings, sit on the roof.

The shop and residence are one continuous structure, so the transition happens inside rather than at a visible seam. Beyond the sales floor the living quarters open into a full-height void, a common device in Japanese townhouses for pulling daylight down into rooms that have no side windows because neighbours are built hard against them.

Upstairs, in the tatami rooms, the transoms are worked in plaster rather than carved wood. This is kote-shiage, finished with the plasterer's trowel, and it takes a specialist. The fittings around them show similarly fine work.

Then there is what the tsunami did. On 11 March 2011 water reached this part of Kesennuma, damaging the exterior walls and flooding the interior. Conservation work followed, with the sand-finished walls of the upstairs tatami room and the pierced transom carving both repaired. Nothing announces this. You would not know unless you were told.

The shop keeps ordinary retail hours, so the interior is accessible during business hours as a customer. Hours and closing days are best confirmed by telephone on 0226-22-0054 before making a special trip. Photography of the exterior from the street is unproblematic; ask before photographing inside, since this is a working shop and a private home. On foot, allow about twenty minutes from JR Kesennuma Station, or use the BRT service toward the inner bay. Several other registered buildings, including Otokoyama Honten and the Onoken Shoten storehouse, stand within a short walk, and the district is best done as a single circuit.