Yamashiroya Old Building

A 1918 Inn Building at the Source of Kaminoyama's Hot Springs

Yamashiroya Kyūkan (山城屋旧館, also written Yamashiroya Kyukan), the former guest wing of the Yamashiroya inn in the Yumachi district of Kaminoyama City, Yamagata Prefecture, was built in 1918 and entered on Japan's register of Tangible Cultural Properties on 28 October 2011. The Agency for Cultural Affairs records it as a two-storey timber building of 219 square metres with a hipped roof clad in sheet iron, standing at the centre of its walled compound.

The address, Yumachi 277, places it in the oldest part of the spa town. Local tradition holds that a travelling monk named Gesshū noticed a crane bathing an injured leg in a marsh spring here in 1458, and that the pools were drained and channelled soon after. For centuries the hot spring went by the name Tsuruhagi, the crane's shin. Yumachi is where that story is set, and the inns along its lanes trace their trade back further than those in any other quarter of the town.

Yamashiroya stopped taking overnight guests in 2010. The company that owns the neighbouring inn Hayamakan bought the property that September and has since used the buildings for a summer shaved-ice shop, a restaurant, a monthly market and rentals for exhibitions and classes. The building is therefore not a museum piece under glass. It has been earning its keep for more than a century, in one form or another.

Why the Building Was Registered

Japan's registration system, introduced in 1996, was designed for buildings roughly fifty years old or more that deserve protection but sit outside the stricter designation categories of National Treasure and Important Cultural Property. Registration obliges the owner to notify the government before altering a substantial part of the exterior, and in exchange offers tax relief and access to repair advice. It is a lighter touch, intended to keep working buildings working.

Yamashiroya Kyūkan was registered under the criterion covering structures that contribute to the historic character of the national landscape. Nothing about it is monumental. What the assessors valued was the way an ordinary provincial inn of the late 1910s solved an ordinary problem: how to sell a view.

Both floors put the guest rooms along the south-east face, the side that looks toward the Zao range. A corridor wraps the rooms on the outside, and the corridor is closed with glass doors rather than solid shutters or paper screens. Sheet glass was still expensive in provincial Japan in 1918, and using it in quantity along an entire elevation was a deliberate investment. Coloured glass appears in the second-floor joinery. The Agency's own assessment describes the result as an inn building of elegant outward appearance, which in the compressed language of these records amounts to praise.

The registration was announced in the seventy-first round of listings, under registration number 06-0126. The storehouse that stands along the east side of the compound, Yamashiroya Nigura, was registered on the same day as 06-0127.

What to Look At

Start with the roof. A hipped roof, yosemune-zukuri, slopes on all four sides and produces a lower, broader silhouette than the gabled roofs common on merchant buildings. Sheet iron replaced the original covering on a great many Tohoku buildings during the twentieth century, chosen because it sheds heavy snow and weighs little. The Agency's record lists sheet iron as the current material.

Then the glazing. Walk the south-east elevation and count the panes. Early sheet glass was drawn or rolled rather than floated, and it carries faint ripples that distort what lies behind them. Where original panes survive, the Zao ridgeline visible through them wobbles slightly as you move your head. The coloured glass in the upper-floor fittings catches afternoon light and throws it onto the corridor floorboards.

The corridor itself is the point of the plan. Japanese inn buildings of this period often ran a passage between the rooms and the outer wall, so that guests could sit at the threshold with the doors pushed back and treat the garden as part of the room. Here that arrangement is doubled: rooms above and below, corridor around both, glass on the outside of each.

The compound holds more than the registered building. A gate, a gravel approach and a garden of pines and azaleas were part of the inn's presentation, and visitors during the Yamashiroya years often remarked that the entrance sequence resembled a samurai residence more than a commercial lodging. Kaminoyama has genuine samurai residences a few minutes' walk away, in the Tsuruhagi-machi quarter, and comparing the two is worth the detour.

Getting There, and What You Can Actually See

Kaminoyama-Onsen Station is a Yamagata Shinkansen stop, about two and a half hours from Tokyo and twelve minutes by local train from Yamagata. Yumachi lies roughly 900 metres from the station, twelve to fifteen minutes on foot through the old town. Kaminoyama Castle, rebuilt in 1982 as a local history museum, is on the way, and the free foot bath beside the crane's resting stone sits a short distance from the Yamashiroya gate.

Yamagata Prefecture's cultural property database lists Yamashiroya Kyūkan as open to the public. In practice, access depends on what the owner is running in the building at the time. The restaurant that opened in April 2015 has since been flagged as unconfirmed on the main Japanese restaurant listings, so anyone travelling specifically to go inside should contact Hayamakan first, on 023-672-0885. The exterior, the gate and the garden frontage can be seen from the lane at any time.

No photography rules have been published for the interior. Since the building is private property in commercial use, ask before photographing inside, and expect the answer to depend on whether other guests are present.

Yamashiroya is also remembered as a place connected with Saitō Mokichi, the tanka poet and psychiatrist born in 1882 in what is now Kaminoyama. During the inn's final decades a room on the upper floor displayed material relating to him, open to visitors without charge. The current owner continues to describe the property as a former inn associated with Mokichi. The Saitō Mokichi Memorial Museum, a separate institution, stands elsewhere in the city and holds the main collection.