Mikawa Family Residence

A Concrete House Built on a Friendship Formed in Germany

The Mikawa Family Residence (三河家住宅, Mikawa-ke Jūtaku) is a reinforced-concrete house at Tomidahama 4-chōme in Tokushima City, Tokushima Prefecture, built around 1928 and designated an Important Cultural Property of Japan on 4 December 2007.

It stands on the bank of the Shinmachi River, just west of the point where the JR Mugi Line crosses the water after pulling out of Tokushima Station. Passengers on that line get perhaps four seconds of it: a mustard-coloured mass with a tower, a roof of red French tiles, and a garden boulder big enough to bulge past the property wall into the car park behind.

The client was Mikawa Yoshiyuki, a doctor of medicine who ran an obstetrics and gynaecology clinic on the adjoining lot to the west. He was born in 1887 into an established family of Kamibun Kamiyama, a mountain village in Myōzai District now absorbed into Kamiyama Town, and was later adopted into the Mikawa household. He took his degree from the medical college of Kyushu Imperial University in 1913, and between 1922 and 1924 he studied in Germany at the University of Berlin.

The man who drew the plans had travelled a parallel road. Kiuchi Toyojirō, born in 1890, graduated in 1909 from the architecture course at Tokushima Prefectural Technical School. He worked at the Tokushima branch of a spinning company, then joined a local timber firm, and in 1922 sailed for Germany to study at the University of Leipzig. He returned home in 1927. The two men had met abroad, and the house followed.

Tokushima burned in the air raid of July 1945. This building did not.

Why the Agency for Cultural Affairs Designated It

The Agency for Cultural Affairs recorded the house under designation criterion (3), the category reserved for buildings of high historical value. The reasoning is worth spelling out, because it has less to do with beauty than with geography.

Reinforced concrete arrived in Japan as a metropolitan technology, handled by large offices in Tokyo and Osaka. Here it was handled by a graduate of a prefectural technical school who spent his working life in Tokushima, for a client who had seen German buildings first-hand and wanted something like them at home. The Agency treats the result as an index work for how modern architecture spread into the provinces, and that argument, rather than any single feature of the design, carried the designation.

The listing covers more than the house. Three tsuketari items, subsidiary structures designated alongside a main building, are included: the iwaya, a concrete storehouse of 31.69 square metres shaped to read as a rock grotto; an outdoor privy of 2.69 square metres; and two runs of gate and wall in concrete and stone whose bends total 44.7 metres. The protected house lot measures 815 square metres and takes in the garden gate, the rear gate, the stone paving, the statuary, and even the septic tank.

The main house has a floor area of 193.30 square metres, rises three storeys with a partial basement, and carries a tiled roof with sections in sheet copper. The Agency dates it to around 1928; some accounts place completion a year later, and the record itself is careful to write the date as approximate.

What to Look For from the Street

The plan is roughly L-shaped, with the entrance tucked into the inner corner where a circular drive once brought cars to the door. Above that corner the tower rises well clear of the roofline. It was built as a viewing platform, and its crown swells into an oval on the east and west faces, ringed by a Lombard band of small arches.

Curves are everywhere once you start counting them. The second floor carries a terrace laid out on a wave plan. The third floor pushes out as a quarter-cylinder. A bow window bellies from the east elevation, a gambrel-roofed projection from the south, a flat-roofed two-storey block from the north. Half-hipped and gabled roofs run west and north from the tower at a steep pitch.

The wall surface is stone at the base and mustard-coloured mortar above. Look along the eaves for a decorative band in a fret pattern, and at the third-floor windows for fluted Ionic pilasters. Braided ornament appears under the cantilever of the entrance terrace and on the vault faces of the triple arch on the third floor. On the north gable, at the very top, sits a beast propping its chin on one hand.

Inside, which almost nobody sees, the entrance vestibule is paved in black and white tile laid as a chequerboard. There are curved fittings and stained glass, mosaic tile on the hall and terrace floors, a heavy winding staircase, an eagle on the dining-room fireplace, a mosaic waterfall in the bathroom, and a coffered coved ceiling in the Japanese-style room.

Visitors should know the situation before travelling. The interior is closed and the grounds are off-limits. The Mikawa family gave the property to Tokushima City in 2011, and as of a Tokushima Shimbun report in July 2026 no full restoration had been carried out, with the paper describing water damage on all three floors, fallen plaster, missing tiles, and a boarded-over window in the billiard room. The city has cited the cost of the works. Photography from the public road is unrestricted, and the exterior is legible enough from the pavement to be worth the walk, roughly fifteen minutes south from Tokushima Station along the river.