Somaya Main House

A Sakata Restaurant Rebuilt on the Ruins of 1894

Sōmaya Shuoku (相馬屋主屋, also written Somaya Shuoku), the main building of a former restaurant at 1-2-20 Hiyoshi-chō in Sakata City, Yamagata Prefecture, dates from about 1895 and was entered on Japan's national register of Tangible Cultural Properties on 20 December 1996. Two storeys of timber under a tiled roof, 483 square metres of floor area, and behind a vermilion wall on a stone slope that most visitors climb without knowing what it leads to.

The construction date is the whole story. At 5:35 in the afternoon on 22 October 1894, a magnitude 7.0 earthquake struck the Shōnai Plain with its epicentre under what is now central Sakata. Fire followed through streets of closely packed wooden houses. Yamagata prefectural records count 726 dead, 3,858 houses collapsed and over 2,000 more burned; a study by the Sakata City Museum puts the number of buildings lost to fire in Sakata alone at 1,747.

Sōmaya had been in business as a restaurant since the closing years of the Edo period. Its main building burned. What did not burn were the dozō, the thick earthen-walled storehouses that merchants across Japan built for exactly this contingency, and which stood among the ashes with their contents intact.

The owners could have cleared the site. They did not. The new main house went up around the surviving storehouses, folding them into the plan of the building rather than replacing them.

Why an Awkward Plan Became Worth Protecting

The Agency for Cultural Affairs assessment identifies two qualities. The first is the plan itself, which links shop, banquet hall and storehouses into one connected sequence and which the Agency describes as unusual. The second is the standard of the joinery in the guest rooms.

Walk the interior and the reason for the first comment becomes obvious. The circulation does not behave like a townhouse and does not behave like a purpose-built restaurant either. Rooms meet at angles that no architect would draw from scratch. Floor levels step. Passages narrow where a storehouse wall interrupts them, because a storehouse wall is a metre of packed earth and nobody was going to move it.

The second point concerns detail rather than layout. Guest rooms were fitted with toko-dana, the tiered shelving that sits beside a tokonoma alcove and holds incense containers, writing boxes and seasonal objects. Getting the proportions of a toko-dana right is a test of a carpenter, and the Agency rates the level of skill in these rooms as high. Sakata had grown wealthy on the kitamaebune, the coastal cargo ships that ran between Osaka and Hokkaidō along the Sea of Japan, and its restaurants competed for shipowners and merchants on precisely this kind of quality.

Registration is a lighter instrument than designation as an Important Cultural Property. Introduced in 1996, it applies to buildings roughly fifty years old or older that either contribute to the landscape, model a design tradition, or would be difficult to reproduce. Sōmaya Shuoku was registered under the third criterion, and its registration number, 06-0003, places it among the first buildings in Yamagata Prefecture ever to receive the status. It came through in the very first round of registrations nationwide.

One point of confusion is worth clearing up. Several local and tourism sources date the registration to November 1996. The Agency's own database records 20 December 1996 as the registration date, with public notice following on 26 December.

What to Look For Inside

The approach runs up Maiko-zaka, a paved slope named for the dancers who work here now. At the top, a vermilion earthen wall and a gate roofed in thatch rather than the tile used everywhere else on the building. A restaurant of this rank announced itself before a guest reached the door, and the gate is that announcement.

Shoes come off at the entrance. Red felt runs across the floors of the rooms beyond. The fusuma sliding panels carry ink painting, and the finger-pulls set into their frames are ceramic in places rather than the usual metal, a minor expense multiplied across every opening in the building.

The second-floor hall is the largest room and the reason most people come. Sakata maiko perform there in the early afternoon, and the programme opens with Sakata Jinku, a folk song about the port in its shipping years. The old kitchen has been converted into their rehearsal space.

Those storehouses that the 1895 builders wrapped into the plan now work as galleries. One holds hina dolls that travelled north from Kyoto by kitamaebune for the Doll Festival, an ordinary consequence of a shipping route that carried culture as freely as it carried rice and dried fish. Another displays paintings and antiques from the collection of the current proprietor.

A separate wing houses a museum devoted to Takehisa Yumeji (1884-1934), the painter whose long-limbed female figures fixed the visual mood of the Taishō era in the public mind. He came to Sakata more than once. The museum opened within the building in May 2008 and shows photographs he took, a camera he used, and works on paper.

Two practical warnings. The building has no elevator, the staircases are steep and there are level changes throughout, so wheelchairs and strollers cannot be brought inside. Visitors are also asked to arrive wearing socks or stockings.