Former Kitamuro Hospital Clinic

What Is the Former Kitamuro Hospital Clinic?

The Former Kitamuro Hospital Clinic (旧北室醫院診療所, Kyū Kitamuro Iin Shinryōjo) is a Western-style wooden clinic building of 1921 in Handa, Tsurugi Town, Tokushima Prefecture, registered as a Registered Tangible Cultural Property on August 17, 2020. The Kitamuro family had practiced herbal medicine here since 1868, and this was the building they put up when the practice turned to Western medicine. It stands a little west of the center of the compound and faces south.

The Kitamuro Clinic is built of timber, 2 storeys with a single-storey part, under a tiled roof partly finished in copper sheet, and covers a building area of 194 square meters. It was extended in the mid-Showa era. The museum on the site calls it the hospital building, and a covered corridor on its north side leads to the inpatient ward.

Why the Former Kitamuro Hospital Clinic Was Registered

The Former Kitamuro Hospital Clinic was entered on the register as a Registered Tangible Cultural Property for contributing to the historic landscape. The Agency for Cultural Affairs points out that it has seen few alterations and still holds much of its medical equipment, and it reads the building as a record of a family that served its district through Western medicine.

The value lies less in polish than in survival. When a village doctor in the Taisho years switched from herbal remedies to Western treatment, what rooms did the new practice need? Waiting room, dispensary, consulting room, operating room, and upstairs, quarters for the nurses: finding all of these still inside one country building is unusual.

The family's older buildings from the herbal era also remain on the site. Set the clinic beside the main house of 1901 and you can see, in the difference between the two, how the same household moved from a Japanese residence to a Western-style hospital within 20 years.

What to Look For at the Kitamuro Clinic

The gabled front and carriage porch

The roof is hipped (Yosemune-zukuri) and covered in pan tiles (Sangawara-buki). Only on the front does a gable rise out of it, with a carriage porch projecting below. That single triangle set into a roof that slopes on all four sides is enough to mark the entrance of a hospital among the farmhouses around it, and the porch lets patients get in and out under cover on a wet day.

Walls that show their frame

On the exterior the posts and horizontal tie beams are left exposed. The narrow panels between them are finished in lime plaster (Shikkui), and the rest is clad in boards. Showing the timber frame on the outside is a traditional Japanese wall technique, and here it seems to have been carried over into a Western-looking facade. In 2020 the exterior paint was redone in colors matched to the original scheme. The museum's website even shows a spot where layers of paint were scraped back to find the first color.

Rooms and instruments left behind

Most of the museum's restoration work has centered on the Former Kitamuro Hospital Clinic. In December 2021 the operating room was reassembled with the surviving instruments, and two of the four nurses' rooms upstairs were returned to the large hall once used as a cultural salon. In April 2024 the old director's office was set up again as a study of a century ago, and a German-made microscope has been repaired. A dispensary sign and an outpatient telephone shared with the dispensary are among the everyday objects still in place.

Seeing Inside the Former Kitamuro Hospital Clinic

The Former Kitamuro Hospital Clinic is the building you enter on a museum visit, and it is the heart of the compound. A guided visit lasts about an hour, and you may pick up some of the exhibits, which is why each tour is kept to 2 to 4 people.

From the gap in the earthen wall on the south side, the front of the clinic comes into view on your left, to the west. Stand a little east of center and look at it on the diagonal to see how the gable and porch sit against the hipped roof. Booking, transport and photography rules are covered on the Former Kitamuro Hospital page.