Sumi Family Residence

What Is the Sumi Family Residence?

The Sumi Family Residence (角家住宅, Sumi-ke Jūtaku) is a rural estate in Nishiarashima-cho, Yasugi City, Shimane Prefecture, built around a main house of 1906, and four of its structures were entered on the national register as Registered Tangible Cultural Properties in 2003. The surname 角 is read "Sumi" here. The same character can also be read kado, meaning "corner", which is how the name was once mistranslated.

The four registered items are the main house, a gate row house, a detached guest room and a brick chimney. All four were registered on 1 December 2003, the registration was published on 25 December, and they carry the consecutive numbers 32-0014 to 32-0017. They share one address, 2172 Shimohishiro, and the Agency for Cultural Affairs database gives no owner.

The main house is dated to 1906, and the other three are recorded as built around the same year. That makes the Sumi Family Residence a compact snapshot of a large household laid out in one campaign at the end of the Meiji era, from the living quarters down to the kitchen chimney.

How the Sumi Family Residence Is Laid Out

According to the Agency's notes, the main house stands roughly in the middle of the plot. The gate row house sits on the east side, toward the north, and serves as the way in. The detached guest room is joined to the southwest corner of the main house by a covered passage, and the brick chimney rises just west of the main house.

The main house dwarfs everything else. Its footprint is 237 square meters, against 54 square meters for the detached guest room and 36 square meters for the gate row house; the chimney is 6 meters tall. Shimane Prefecture's list of registered properties gives the main house as 285 square meters, a figure that does not match the national database.

Roof shapes differ from building to building. The main house and the gate row house have hipped-and-gabled Irimoya-zukuri roofs, while the guest room has a simple gabled Kirizuma-zukuri roof, all covered in Sangawara-buki pantiles. The Agency's note on the gate row house points out that, unlike the main house, it does not use red tiles, so the estate shows two colors of roof side by side.

The registration criteria split the group in two. The main house and the guest room were judged to be "models of form", while the gate row house and the chimney were registered for their contribution to the historic landscape. Each structure has its own page describing its construction in detail.

The Sumi Family Residence near Lake Nakaumi

The Agency describes the Sumi Family Residence as standing a short distance from the southern shore of Nakaumi, the brackish lagoon shared by Shimane and Tottori prefectures. Arashima lies in the western part of Yasugi, close to the boundary with Matsue, and the lagoon opens to the north of the estate.

The Agency calls the main house a fine example of large-scale vernacular architecture and says the gate row house conveys the look of the countryside in the late Meiji period. A big farmhouse, a guest wing with its own tea room, a gate building with rooms, and a brick kitchen chimney together give a sense of how a substantial local household lived in this district around 1906.

Visiting the Sumi Family Residence

Neither Yasugi City nor Shimane Prefecture publishes opening days or admission details for the Sumi Family Residence, and the national database records no owner or public access. It should be treated as a private property: do not enter the grounds. Anyone hoping to visit or photograph it should first contact the Culture Division of the Yasugi City Board of Education (tel. 0854-23-3185; office hours 8:30 a.m. to 5:15 p.m. on weekdays).

The nearest station is Arashima on the JR San'in Line. Measured on map coordinates, the residence lies about 1.2 kilometers west-southwest of the station in a straight line, so the walk on actual roads is longer. How much of each building can be seen from the road has not been confirmed.