Shinmachikan (Miyake Family Residence)

A Concrete Box Built Through an Earthquake

Shinmachikan, also recorded as Miyake-ke Jutaku (新町館（三宅家住宅）, the Miyake family residence), is a reinforced concrete house at Hakusan 1-chome in Bunkyo Ward, Tokyo, dating from the early Showa period and listed as a Registered Tangible Cultural Property (登録有形文化財) on 2 September 1998. The Agency for Cultural Affairs records one building of reinforced concrete with a basement and three storeys above ground, occupying a footprint of only 57 square metres.

The registration record contains one line that reorders everything else: the building was commissioned as a combined residence and law office, and the Great Kanto Earthquake struck while it was under construction. That earthquake hit at two minutes to noon on 1 September 1923 and killed more than a hundred thousand people, most of them in the fires that followed. A house already rising in concrete when the ground moved was, at that moment, an argument being made in real time.

Dating is not entirely settled. The Agency lists the period as early Showa with a year range of 1926 to 1988, the later figure reflecting subsequent alteration. Since the description places the earthquake during construction, work must have begun before September 1923, and the building appears to have been completed some years afterwards. Anyone citing a single construction year should treat it with caution.

Classical Ornament on an Early Modern House

Reinforced concrete arrived in Japan in the 1900s and went first into offices, banks and warehouses. Applying it to a private house, and giving that house a flat roof instead of tiles, was rare enough in the 1920s that the Agency for Cultural Affairs describes Shinmachikan as an early example of the reinforced concrete flat-roofed dwelling. The registration criterion applied to it is that the building is a model of design, a category reserved for work with formal or technical significance rather than for buildings valued mainly as scenery.

The composition is straightforward and deliberately so. A box-shaped volume is pierced by tall narrow openings. An entrance porch projects on the north face. On the south face a bay window pushes out to catch the light, a device borrowed from Western domestic architecture and unusual on Japanese houses of the period.

Two finishing details give the building its character. The walls are rendered in what Japanese builders call doitsu-kabe, German wall: mortar thrown or flicked onto the surface and left rough, producing a coarse, shadow-catching texture that was fashionable in Taisho and early Showa Japan and read as European. Under the eaves runs a band of small blocks shaped like triglyphs, the grooved elements that punctuate the frieze of a Greek Doric temple.

That last detail is worth pausing on. Triglyphs originated as the carved ends of timber beams in archaic Greek construction, and they had been an inert decorative convention for two thousand years by the time this house was built. Here they sit on reinforced concrete, on a modest three-storey box in a Tokyo backstreet, on a building whose real subject is fire resistance. The architect wanted the new material to say something familiar.

Registration came in 1998, in the eleventh round of registrations, only two years after the register was created. Its number is 13-0019, low enough to place it among the earliest entries from Tokyo.

Finding It in the Hakusan Backstreets

Shinmachikan stands where a narrow lane turns at a right angle, in the residential grid west of Hakusan-dori. Nothing announces it. Walkers who know it is there recognise the porch first, then the vertical windows, then the little row of blocks under the eaves.

The house remains in private use and is not open to the public. Its registration, like that of most registered dwellings, covers the exterior as seen from the road, and viewing from the lane is what is on offer.

Access is easy: Hakusan Station on the Toei Mita subway line is a few minutes away on foot, and Hon-Komagome Station on the Tokyo Metro Namboku Line is a short walk in the other direction. The surrounding streets reward the detour. Enjoji, a small temple a few minutes north, holds the grave of Yaoya Oshichi, the greengrocer's daughter executed in 1683 whose story became a staple of kabuki and bunraku. Igazaka, a slope descending to Hakusan-dori, carries a ward information board explaining two competing traditions about its name, one involving a garrison of Iga men, the other a daimyo residence. Hakusan Shrine, known for its hydrangeas in June, sits a little to the north.

Photography from the public lane is unrestricted, but the street is narrow and residential, and the usual courtesies apply. Bunkyo Ward maintains a substantial list of nationally registered buildings, and several stand within walking distance, among them the Shimazono residence of 1932 in Sendagi and the Hashimoto residence of 1933 in Nishikata. A morning spent linking them together shows how varied Tokyo's interwar domestic architecture was, and how narrowly some of it survived.