Shimamura Family Residence Main House

A Photographer's American House in Wakayama

Shimamura Family Residence Main House (島村家住宅主屋, Shimamura-ke Jūtaku Shuoku, also written Shimamura-ke Jutaku Shuoku) is a two-storey wooden house at Horidome-higashi in Wakayama City, Wakayama Prefecture, completed in 1926 and entered on Japan's national register of Tangible Cultural Properties on 10 November 2005. The Agency for Cultural Affairs lists it under registration number 30-0077, with a building footprint of 203 square metres.

The house came from a firm called Amerika-ya (あめりか屋), which Hashiguchi Shinsuke founded in Tokyo in 1909 after several years of drifting through jobs in the United States. He shipped home six prefabricated bungalow kits, put them up in Akasaka as rental housing for foreign residents, and turned that experiment into what is generally counted as Japan's first company devoted purely to designing and building houses. Amerika-ya argued a specific case: drop the formal reception room that Japanese plans had always placed at the front, and organise the house around a living room where the family actually sits. The firm pushed that idea through its magazine Jūtaku and through model houses at the 1922 exhibitions in Tokyo and Osaka.

Wakayama Prefecture's cultural properties record says the client was a photographer who had lived in America for many years and built this house on his return, with completion traditionally given as 1926. The Shimamura family bought it a few years afterwards. They were merchants of some reach: sake brewing from the Meiji period onward, then electric power, then the streetcar line that later became the Nankai Wakayama tramway.

Two great earthquakes tested it. The Tōnankai quake of 1944 and the Nankai quake of 1946 both shook this coast hard, and the house is reported to have come through with little damage.

Why It Was Registered

Japan runs two parallel systems for historic buildings, and the difference matters for what you can expect to see. Designation as an Important Cultural Property (重要文化財) is restrictive, reserved for a small number of nationally significant structures, and usually comes with public access. Registration (登録有形文化財), created by a 1996 amendment to the Cultural Properties Protection Act, is deliberately lighter: owners go on living in the building, and government consent is required only for substantial alteration. Most registered buildings are at least fifty years old. Shimamura House sits in the second system and remains a private home.

The criterion cited for the main house is that it stands as a model of its type of design. The Agency's own description explains what that means here. The frame is timber, two storeys, with a hipped roof in sangawara pantiles and mortar-rendered walls outside. An entrance porch faces north. A terrace with a pergola opens to the south. Bay windows and semicircular arched openings set the vocabulary.

Then comes the detail that keeps the building interesting. Along the south side and continuing round to the east, the ground floor switches to Japanese-style design. The upper floor and the north face read as an American suburban house of the 1920s; part of the lower floor does not. Amerika-ya spent years attacking the awkward double life of Western clothes outside and Japanese clothes at home, so a plan that admits Japanese rooms into the sunniest corner of the ground floor is a compromise worth noticing rather than a failure of nerve.

Wakayama City's heritage office adds two observations from closer inspection: stained glass survives in several windows, and the joinery has held its shape, with the doors and sliding frames showing little of the warping a century usually brings. The prefecture also records the house as one of the earliest fully electrified homes in Japan, wired from the start for heating and kitchen equipment at a time when most Japanese houses ran on charcoal and firewood.

What You Can Actually See

This is a private residence. There is no interior access, no opening season, and no admission desk. What you get is the street view over a two-metre concrete wall, which is itself separately registered, and that view rewards a slow walk rather than a glance.

Stand on the road along the north boundary. The gate sits in a shallow recess set back from the pavement, and through and above it you catch the north porch and the hipped roof. The tiled roof gives the game away that this is a Japanese building; almost everything below it argues otherwise. Look for the mortar render, still crisp at the corners, and for the window openings, where the semicircular heads punctuate an otherwise rectangular grid.

Photography from the public road is fine. Do not use a ladder, do not shoot over the wall into the garden, and do not ring the bell. People live here.

The nearest stop is Horidome on National Route 42, roughly a hundred metres south of the house, served by Wakayama Bus from both JR Wakayama Station and Nankai Wakayama-shi Station in something like fifteen minutes. Route 42 is the old streetcar alignment, which closed in 1971, so the family that once ran trams now lives beside the buses that replaced them.

Three more registered buildings sit within a short walk, and together they make the detour worthwhile. Kiwata Family Residence Main House at Horidome-higashi 1-2-28 is a single-storey 1940 house with a Spanish-tiled Western reception wing and paired arched windows, registered in 2013. Mio Family Residence Main House at Horidome-nishi 1-17 is an 1841 merchant townhouse with latticed ground-floor windows and symmetrical mushiko plaster grilles above. About three hundred metres west, the Former Matsui Villa now trades as the Ganko Rokusan-en restaurant, where a whole cluster of registered structures including the main house, tea room, water tower and earthen walls can be seen by anyone who books a table.