Jizoji Temple Hojuin Kamaya (Kitchen House)

Kitchen Below, Servants' Rooms Above

Jizoji Temple Hojuin Kamaya (地蔵寺寳珠院釜屋, Jizōji Hōjuin Kamaya) is a two-storey wooden kitchen house built in the Taisho era (1912 to 1926) in Matsushima-cho, Komatsushima City, Tokushima Prefecture, and was registered as a Registered Tangible Cultural Property on 29 November 2016. In the Hojuin residence owned by Jizoji Temple, this was the building where the cooking was done and where live-in staff slept.

It stands immediately east of the main house, nearly touching it. The roof is gabled (Kirizuma-zukuri) in round-and-flat Hongawarabuki tiles, and its lean-to Geya roofs use pan tiles (Sangawara-buki) exactly as the main house does. It covers 73 square metres. That a service building copies the main house down to its choice of tiles tells you the household treated the whole compound as one design.

The ground floor is split north to south. The southern half is a stone-paved earthen floor (Doma) with the cooking stoves, the kama that give the building its name. The northern half served as storage.

Upstairs, an open well in the middle rises through the building, with a room for the women servants on its south side and a room for the men on its north. The void let smoke and heat escape from the stoves, and it kept the two rooms apart.

Work Moved Out of the Main House

The Agency for Cultural Affairs explains the Jizoji Temple Hojuin Kamaya as the functions of the main house's earthen-floored area separated into a building of their own, and registered it as a "model of form and design."

In a traditional Japanese house the earthen floor inside the entrance usually doubled as the kitchen, stoves included. The main house here, built in 1904, has such an entrance area toward its east end. Once the kamaya went up in the Taisho era, the work involving fire and the living quarters of the staff moved outside, and the main house's earthen floor became more of a formal entrance.

Separate rooms for men and women servants show that this was a household large enough to keep several live-in staff. While the front of the property was given over to reception rooms and a garden, the work that supported them was gathered here.

What to Look For

From outside, notice how close it sits to the main house and how the roofs match. Round tiles above and pan-tiled lean-tos below, on both buildings, make the two read almost as one run of roofs.

Inside, the stone-paved floor, the stoves and the open well upstairs are the essentials. The well served as a smoke vent and a light shaft, and it divides the upper floor physically. The section of the building shows how live-in household work was organized.

Seeing the Kamaya

The Jizoji Temple Hojuin Kamaya stands inside the walls on the east side of the main house. Only part of its roof shows from the road, and there are no scheduled openings. Contact Jizoji Temple in advance if you hope to see it.