Former Umezu Dental Clinic Residence

The Japanese Half of a Two-Faced House

The Former Umetsu Dental Clinic Residential Wing (旧梅津歯科医院住居棟, also written Kyū Umetsu Shika-in Jūkyotō) is a two-storey Japanese-style timber house of 1927 at Tōkamachi in Kaminoyama City, Yamagata Prefecture, listed as a Registered Tangible Cultural Property (登録有形文化財) on 17 February 2022 under number 06-0198.

It is the largest of the five registered buildings on the property, with 115 square metres of building area, and it attaches to the west flank of the Western-style consulting wing built in the same year. The two went up together as one project. One received a pediment and a finial; this one received an irimoya roof in sheet iron with onigawara ridge boards, the decorative end pieces that finish a Japanese ridge.

Architectural historians call this arrangement the parallel Japanese-Western type. Rather than blending the two idioms into a single hybrid, a household would build one of each and connect them, using the Western building for public and professional life and the Japanese one for family life. The Umetsu compound is a clear provincial example, and unusually the two halves survive together with the outbuildings that served them.

Two Floors, Two Registers of Formality

The ground floor holds a south-facing entrance, a kitchen, and a run of connected zashiki rooms for ordinary daily use. Connected rooms of this kind, separated only by sliding panels, could be opened into one long space when needed and closed back into separate rooms afterwards. Japanese houses have used this flexibility for centuries.

Upstairs the same arrangement recurs, but the finish changes. The second-floor rooms carry gōtenjō, coffered ceilings whose grid of moulded timber ribs marks a space as formal. The Agency for Cultural Affairs describes the upper storey as openly built to take advantage of the view. Kaminoyama sits in a basin with the Zaō range on its eastern horizon, and the town's own list of recommended vantage points includes the outlook over the townscape toward those peaks, though the surviving records do not state which direction the Umetsu rooms were oriented to catch.

The point of the upper floor was receiving guests. Note where that leaves the ground floor: family life below, hospitality above, with the staircase acting as the boundary. In many Japanese houses of this scale the formal reception room sits on the ground floor beside the entrance. Putting it upstairs was a decision about light and outlook, and it changes how a visitor would have experienced arriving.

A Deliberate Contrast with the Storehouse

The official description makes a comparison worth following up. It calls the upper floor a reception space in good contrast with the parlour storehouse (座敷蔵) that stands in the same garden.

That storehouse, built five years earlier in 1922, also contains formal rooms: a Buddhist altar room and a zashiki with an alcove, held inside thick earthen walls with heavy beams overhead. It is dark, enclosed and solid. The second floor of the residential wing is its opposite in almost every respect, open on its outer faces and lifted toward the light.

A household with both had two quite different rooms to offer a guest, and could choose according to the occasion and the season. Reading the two buildings against each other tells you more about how this family lived than either does alone. That relationship is also why the buildings were registered as a group rather than singly.

Registration itself is the lighter of Japan's two protective systems. Introduced in 1996, it asks owners to notify the authorities of planned alterations instead of applying for permission, which makes it workable for buildings still in private hands. The residential wing was registered under the criterion of being a model of design, as were the consulting wing and the parlour storehouse; the grain and miso storehouses at the rear were registered for their contribution to the historic landscape.

Practical Notes for Visitors

The building is a private residence and is not open to the public. No admission fee, no opening hours, no interior visits. Kaminoyama City's published list of cultural-property buildings open for viewing does not include it, and travellers hoping to see the coffered ceilings should adjust their expectations before setting out.

What is available is the view from the street. The site lies about five minutes on foot from Kaminoyama-Onsen Station on the JR Ōu Main Line, roughly 20 minutes by local train from Yamagata Station. Photography from the public road is unobjectionable; entering the grounds or photographing the household is not.

For interiors of a comparable kind, the Miwa residence on the Nakachō samurai street a short walk north is open to visitors, and three neighbouring samurai houses can be seen from their gardens without charge. The Kaisendō, another registered property in the city, combines an exhibition hall with the former Hasegawa family house and is open as a museum. Between those and the reconstructed keep of Kaminoyama Castle, a half day in the old castle town is easily filled.