Shimazono Family Residence Main Building

The Shimazono Residence: A Doctor's Modern House in Old Sendagi

Climb the slope north of Sendagi Station and you reach a quiet pocket of Bunkyo where prewar streets survived the bombs and the bulldozers. A rose trellis frames the front gate of a pale Western-style house. Look up: a row of small arches runs in a continuous band beneath the first-floor eaves, the kind of detail a passerby might miss and a returning visitor never forgets.

This is the Shimazono Residence, finished in 1932 as the newlywed home of Shimazono Norio, a medical scientist who later taught at Wayo Women's University. The architect was Yabe Matakichi. Nearly a century on, the house is a Registered Tangible Cultural Property of Japan, opened to the public only on occasional days each year.

The name on the register, Shimazono-ke Jūtaku Shuoku, means simply "the main house of the Shimazono family residence." That wording matters now. The house once stood beside a Japanese-style annex with a moss garden, but the annex and garden were taken down in 2022. What you see today is the Western wing alone, the part that the family fought hardest to keep.

What a "Registered" Cultural Property Means

Visitors who know Japan's better-publicized National Treasures and Important Cultural Properties sometimes expect every protected building to be a temple or castle. The Shimazono Residence belongs to a younger, lighter category. Japan created the Registered Tangible Cultural Property system in 1996 to protect the country's rapidly disappearing modern architecture, much of it private and still in use. Registration recognizes a building's value while letting owners go on living and working inside it, rather than freezing it as a museum piece.

The Shimazono house was entered on the register on 12 October 2001. Its building footprint is about 145 square meters: a two-story wooden structure with a tiled roof. The criterion cited is the one used for designs judged to be a model of their type, and the official description singles out one quality above all, the way the architect knitted two very different building campaigns into a single coherent face.

Two Houses in One: 1932 and 1941

When Yabe drew up the original house in 1932, the Western wing had a flat roof and stood only one story tall, with internal gutters hidden from view. That low, horizontal silhouette belonged to the modern idiom of the day. Then in 1941 a second floor went up.

An addition can easily ruin a small house, leaving the eye to trip over the seam. Here it does not. The horizontal line of the first-floor eaves still reads as a memory of the original flat roof, and the band of small arches that decorates the ground floor was carried upward and repeated, so the new upper story looks as though it had always been intended. Stand across the street and the building reads as one design rather than two.

Yabe himself died in 1941, the year the upper floor was finished. The Agency for Cultural Affairs credits him with the design of both the original house and the addition; the volunteers who care for the building today attribute the second-floor work to Koga Ichirō. Either way, the result honors the first conception.

The Hand Behind the Design: Yabe Matakichi

Yabe Matakichi (1888–1941) grew up in Yokohama, trained at the Kōshu Gakkō (the forerunner of Kogakuin University), and apprenticed under Tsumaki Yorinaka, one of the leading government architects of the Meiji era. He then sailed for Germany and studied at the technical college in Charlottenburg, now part of the Technical University of Berlin.

Most of Yabe's career went into banks. He designed a long series of buildings for the Kawasaki Bank, including a head office whose facade was later relocated to the Meiji-mura open-air museum, and a Chiba branch now preserved within the Chiba City Museum of Art. Surviving houses by his hand are rare, which makes the Shimazono Residence an unusual chance to read a bank architect's vocabulary at domestic scale. The German training shows in the relief-like arcade under the eaves, the trellis at the entrance, and a fondness for solid, well-made joinery.

The Family: Beriberi, Vitamins, and a House Full of Books

The Shimazono were once physicians to the Kishū domain in what is now Wakayama. The most famous of them, Shimazono Junjirō (1877–1937), rose to lead the First Department of Internal Medicine at Tokyo Imperial University. He is remembered for ending one of the longest arguments in Japanese medicine. In 1934 he published the research that established beriberi as a disease of vitamin B1 deficiency, settling a controversy that had divided doctors for decades. (The vitamin itself, oryzanin, had been isolated earlier by the chemist Suzuki Umetarō; Junjirō's contribution was the clinical proof.)

The house, however, was built for his eldest son, Norio, on the occasion of Norio's marriage. A nice thread connects father and son inside the walls: the light fittings in the entrance hall and dining room were salvaged from Junjirō's own residence, since demolished, and rehung here. The study deserves a slow look. Its walls are lined floor to ceiling with built-in bookshelves made to Norio's own measurements, and part of his library is still in place. Heavy furniture and a pendulum clock, brought by ship from Germany, sit in rooms that feel less like a showpiece than a place where people actually read and talked.

What to Look For Inside

Off the study lies a sunroom, glassed in with sturdy double windows that were once French casements. The doubled glazing is a Northern European habit rarely seen in Japanese homes of the period, and it floods the adjoining living room with light.

Climb to the 1941 second floor and the mood shifts. One Western room holds stained glass whose panels depict warships and fighter aircraft, a startling reminder that the upper story rose in the year Japan went to war in the Pacific. Few houses wear their date so openly. Nearby, a refined Japanese room in the sukiya manner appears almost without warning, and a Buddhist altar enshrines an image of Yakushi Nyorai, the Healing Buddha, a quiet and fitting choice for a household of doctors. The shift from Western parlor to tatami room to family altar, all on one floor, is the kind of blend that became common in interwar Japan and is now hard to find intact.

How the House Survived

In January 2000 the heirs telephoned the editors of a local neighborhood magazine. The last residents, Norio and his wife, had died, and no one lived in the house any longer. The family could not bring themselves to demolish the rooms where Norio's parents had begun married life and where Norio himself was born and raised. That call set the preservation in motion, and registration followed the next year. Keeping a private wooden house standing for a century is expensive and unglamorous, and in 2022 the family sold half the land and gave up the Japanese annex and garden to save the rest. The Western house you visit today is the survivor of that hard arithmetic.

Around the Neighborhood

The residence sits in the Yanesen district, a name stitched from Yanaka, Nezu, and Sendagi, three adjoining quarters that kept their lanes, wooden shops, and temple walls when most of Tokyo was rebuilt. The slope just below the house is Dango-zaka, a street tied to the novelist Mori Ōgai, who lived nearby and whose memorial museum stands a short walk away.

A few minutes' walk brings you to Sudō Park, a small public garden with a pond and a waterfall on the site of a former feudal estate. On the way you pass the former Yasuda Kusuo Residence Garden, a Taishō-era house with a Tokyo-designated scenic garden, open on selected days. Nezu Shrine, famous for its tunnel of vermilion gates and its spring azaleas, lies a little further south, and the lively Yanaka Ginza shopping street is an easy detour. The area rewards aimless walking more than a checklist.