Former Koike Pharmacy Ebisu-Ya Main Store

Reinforced Concrete on a Provincial Shopping Street, 1934

The Former Koike Pharmacy Ebisuya Main Store (旧小池薬局恵比寿屋本店, Kyū Koike Yakkyoku Ebisuya Honten) is a reinforced-concrete commercial building of 1934 standing on Ginza-dori in central Tsuruoka, Yamagata Prefecture, and it was entered on Japan's national register of Tangible Cultural Properties on 2 November 2018. The building has three storeys above ground and one below, with a footprint of 136 square metres.

The plan is a plain rectangle, and the interest is concentrated on the narrow street front. The ground floor is finished to read as masonry, with the joint lines and heavy proportions of cut stone rendered in concrete. From the first floor upward the wall switches to tile, laid in slender vertical units that catch the light differently at each hour. Where the two treatments meet, and again at the cornice, the surface is worked with shallow incised bands.

At the centre of the cornice sits a medallion, a circular relief panel. The figure in it is identified as Ebisu, the god of commerce and fishing among the seven deities of good fortune, holding a sea bream under one arm. The shop that commissioned the building traded under the name Ebisuya, so the crowning ornament is also a signboard.

For a building of this date in a town of this size, the ambition is the point. Tsuruoka in 1934 was a castle town of the former Shonai domain with a commercial street of timber shopfronts. A three-storey concrete block with a basement, a stone-effect base and a decorative cornice was a statement about where the owner thought the street was heading.

Why It Was Registered

The Agency for Cultural Affairs registered the building under the criterion for structures that serve as a model of design, and its assessment calls it a good example of an early reinforced-concrete office block within Yamagata Prefecture. Concrete construction reached Japanese cities from the 1910s and spread to regional centres unevenly through the 1920s and 1930s, usually first for banks, government offices and department stores. A pharmacy on a local shopping street was not the expected client.

The detailing places it firmly in its decade. The Yamagata Shimbun, reporting on the building's recent reuse, notes that the design takes up the Art Deco manner then in fashion, and the geometry of the incised bands and the disciplined vertical tiling support that reading. Nothing here is historicist revival; the ornament is flat, linear and machine-minded.

Registration in 2018 gave the building register number 06-0191 in the 91st round of registrations. Under this system the owner notifies the government before altering the exterior, while the building stays in ordinary use. That flexibility matters for a structure of this kind, because its survival depends on someone finding a commercial use for it.

One inconsistency should be flagged for anyone checking sources. The Agency for Cultural Affairs gives the address as 1-6-88 Honcho; the business now operating on the ground floor lists 1-6-8. The Agency's record is the authoritative one.

Inside: Pharmacy, Offices, Warehouse, Café

The original arrangement put a shop on the ground floor and offices on the two floors above, a vertical division common to interwar commercial buildings and one that the interior still reflects. The ground-floor room is tall, considerably taller than the storey height of the floors above, which is what a retail space of the period demanded.

Use drifted over the decades. For a stretch the building served as storage, then opened intermittently for events and short-run pop-up shops as the shopping street tried to draw people back. Around 2020 the machizukuri company Kakugin, based in Tsuruoka, leased the building from its owner, Tsuruoka Inryo Co., Ltd., and began preparing it for permanent use.

In 2025 a café and bar called ebisuya opened on the ground floor. It keeps the original room largely as found, with the stone-effect surfaces and the high ceiling left visible, and furnishes it with antique sofas and other old furniture. A director of the operating company described the aim as a place where people can drop in and meet each other, which is a modest brief for a building that has spent most of a decade half empty. Opening hours run from nine in the morning until midnight, closing days are irregular, and the telephone number is 0235-22-2202.

This means the building can be entered, which is uncommon for a registered property in private commercial hands. Visitors who want to see the interior should buy a coffee rather than ask for a tour. The upper floors are not open.

The Street Around It

Ginza-dori runs south from the station area under a single-sided arcade, and for years it carried the local nickname of a shuttered street. That has been changing. Local reporting in 2025 counted six new businesses opening on the street within two years, among them cafés and a wine bar, with former shop premises being converted into rental offices. One nearby owner has filled a former clothing store with film posters, records and old manga as a Showa-era subculture collection, and turned the house behind it into a guesthouse.

Reaching the building is straightforward. Tsuruoka is served by JR Uetsu Main Line trains and by the Shonai Airport bus; the Ginza-dori arcade is roughly a fifteen to twenty minute walk south of JR Tsuruoka Station, or a short taxi ride. The exterior can be looked at freely at any hour and photographed from the street without permission.

Tsuruoka rewards a longer stay. The city holds twenty-six nationally registered cultural properties alongside its designated ones, and the Chido Museum, the Taihokan hall and the Tsuruoka Catholic Church stand within walking distance of one another west of the shopping district. The city was named a UNESCO Creative City of Gastronomy in 2014, and it is the usual base for pilgrims heading to the three sacred mountains of Dewa.