Former Koshundo Clinic

The Former Koshundo Clinic

The Former Koshundo Clinic (旧壺春堂醫院, Kyū Koshundō Iin) in Minano, Minano Town, Chichibu District, Saitama Prefecture, is the house and surgery of the doctor and haiku poet Kaneko Genshun, and its two buildings, a main house of the late Edo period and a storehouse of 1934, were registered as Registered Tangible Cultural Properties on February 4, 2021 (Agency for Cultural Affairs). Locally it is simply called Koshundo.

This is also the house where Kaneko Tota (1919–2018), one of the poets who reshaped haiku after the war, spent his boyhood. The Agency notes its value for literary history as the family home of a celebrated poet.

A Country Doctor Comes Home

According to a paper in Aichi University's Dobun Shoin bulletin, Kaneko Genshun was born in Minano village in 1889, trained at Kyoto Prefectural Medical College and in 1920 went to Shanghai as school doctor of the Toa Dobun Shoin. He came home in 1926 and opened a practice in his family house: this was Koshundo. A Saitama Prefecture townscape survey also dates the opening of the clinic to 1926.

Tota recalled that the Kaneko family was an old house on the road into Chichibu that kept silkworms and ran a noodle shop. Family tradition holds that the name Koshundo joins a jar (ko) given to Genshun when he left Shanghai with the shun, or spring, of his own name.

Genshun wrote haiku under the name Isekiko and was a friend of the poet Mizuhara Shuoshi from their school days. In 1929 he reworked the words and tune of the Chichibu Ondo folk song into the form still danced today (Aichi University; Saitama Prefecture). Tota is said to have been born in 1919 at his mother's family home in Ogawa, in neighbouring Hiki District, and grew up here from early childhood.

The Two Buildings

The main house is a 2-storey building under a gabled roof, its ridge running north to south, with the south gable end turned to the old highway (Agency for Cultural Affairs). It dates from the late Edo period and was enlarged in the early Meiji era. A guest room and Buddhist altar room were added on the north side of the original four-room plan, and the roof space was fitted out for silkworm rearing (Minano Tourism Association).

The storehouse stands toward the northwest of the plot, facing west. Built in 1934 and moved here in 1963, it held medical equipment and household goods (Agency for Cultural Affairs). A stone inscribed with one of Tota's haiku stands in the grounds (Saitama Prefecture).

The Agency registered the two buildings together, noting that the storehouse and the main house now serve as a local cultural centre and contribute to the townscape. Each building has its own page with details of its construction.

From Clinic to Memorial House

After Tota's death a local group, the Tota Ubusuna Society, formed to save the buildings and their papers, and raised donations to repair them. On September 23, 2019, the centenary of Tota's birth, the interior was opened and the house was set up as the Koshundo Memorial House (Saitama Prefecture). Poem cards by Mizuhara Shuoshi, Kato Shuson and other poets who knew the family are kept inside (Minano Tourism Association).

In November 2020 a ceremony marked the registration, and a new name board reading Koshundo, paid for by donors and a crowdfunding campaign, was unveiled (Tokyo Shimbun).

Visiting

Koshundo is within walking distance of Minano Station on the Chichibu Railway, on prefectural road 43 (the Saitama townscape survey maps it near the station). The Tota Ubusuna Society, which runs the house, gives the walk from the station toward Nagatoro as about 4 minutes.

The Minano Tourism Association lists Friday as the closing day and asks visitors to get in touch before coming. The house opens for special exhibitions; in 2023 a show on the history of the Chichibu Ondo ran from 10 a.m. to 3 p.m. No official information on admission fees or photography was found, so contact the society before you go.