Shunan City Mayor's Official Residence, Western Wing

Thirty-Six Square Metres of Official Face

The Western Wing of the Shunan City Mayor's Official Residence (周南市市長公舎洋館, Shunan-shi Shichō Kōsha Yōkan, also romanised Shunan-shi Shicho Kosha Yokan) is a single-storey wooden building in Keiman-chō, Shunan City, Yamaguchi Prefecture, completed in 1926 and entered on Japan's national register of Tangible Cultural Properties on 23 October 2008.

Its registered building area is 36 square metres. Inside that footprint there is an entrance hall, a reception room and a lavatory, and very little else. Everything a household actually needs sits behind it, in the 238-square-metre Japanese wing that reached the register on the same day under its own separate number.

So this is not a house. It is the part of a house that meets visitors.

Construction finished on 24 February 1926, and the man it was built for was the director of the Tokuyama Naval Fuel Depot. The depot's origins go back to 1905, when the Imperial Japanese Navy set up a coal briquette works at Tokuyama after local residents campaigned hard to win it. In 1921 the works was reorganised into a fuel depot (nenryōshō), and Shunan City's own account connects that change directly to this building: the directorship now went to a rear admiral, and a flag officer required quarters of appropriate rank. Officers' housing and a naval club once stood in the surrounding streets. None of that remains.

Local people call the compound Kyū Shichō Kōsha (旧市長公舎), the former mayor's residence. The registered names still say "Mayor's Official Residence" because that is what it was for sixty-five years, but the last mayor moved out in 2011.

Two Registrations, One Roofline

Japan protects historic buildings at two very different intensities. Designation (shitei) as an Important Cultural Property or National Treasure is rare, strict and comes with heavy obligations. Registration (tōroku), created by a 1996 revision of the Cultural Properties Protection Act, is deliberately lighter: it covers buildings generally at least fifty years old, asks owners to notify the state before altering the exterior, and otherwise leaves them free to use the property. The system exists precisely for buildings like this one, which are locally important and still in working use.

When the Shunan property came up in 2008, the reviewers split it in two, and the reasoning behind that split is what the register records. The western half became number 35-0062 under the criterion "contributing to the historic landscape of the nation", while the Japanese half became 35-0063 under "serving as a model of design". The city explains the division simply: the two halves have different characters, so they were assessed as two things.

The landscape criterion is the one that carries the weight here, and understanding why means going back to 1945. On 10 May, B-29s struck the fuel depot. On 27 July they came for the town itself. Between those two raids the built centre of old Tokuyama was almost entirely burned out. The director's residence, sitting north of the town on its long garden plot, was not. Wartime accounts record an air-raid shelter of about six tatami dug in the front garden near the western wing, though nothing of it shows today.

That is the argument in one sentence: this steep gable is one of the few pre-war faces central Tokuyama has left, and the register says so.

The design has never been firmly attributed. Yamaguchi Prefecture's cultural property database states that it is thought to be the work of the construction section of the Kure Naval District, and stops there. No architect's name has been confirmed.

What to Look At

Approach from the west, through the gate and around the carriage rotary, and the first thing the building shows you is a gable wall pitched much more steeply than a Japanese roof would be. Behind it, running north, two more gabled roofs step down in sequence on a north-south axis. The composition is small but it has been arranged with some care about how it reads from the street.

The wall below divides into three bands. Brick at the base. Ochre glazed tile above that. Then the upper zone, where dark timbers are set into pale plaster in the half-timbered manner of sixteenth-century English building, filtered through what Japanese architects of the 1920s understood as the Tudor style. Half-timbering in Taishō Japan is almost always decorative rather than structural, and it is used here to give a naval officer's front door a note of restrained Western formality.

The porch is the detail most people miss. Its roof rests on Tuscan columns cut from granite quarried at Tokuyama. Imported stone would have been the obvious luxury choice; local granite, dressed to a classical order, says something quieter about a naval installation that had been reshaping this town's economy for twenty years.

Inside, the reception room is where the 1926 budget went. The ceiling is a coved coffered ceiling (orīage gōtenjō), the highest-ranking ceiling type in Japanese formal building, adapted here to a Western room: the coffers sit within a curved cove that lifts the ceiling away from the walls. Those walls are white lime plaster laid over wooden lath. Ceiling boards, dado panelling and doors use plywood veneer, which in 1926 was a modern industrial material rather than a cheap substitute. Paired double-hung sash windows face west and south, so the room fills with light from two sides through most of the day.

Step back outside and look at the garden. The front court holds a shinji-ike, a pond cut to the shape of the character 心 (heart or mind), though the water has been drained and only the outline survives. Trained pines, bayberry and cycads grow around the buildings. The city describes the grounds as among the more substantial gardens in Shunan, and the total site runs to 1,685.21 square metres for 273.70 square metres of building.

Getting Inside

This is not a museum, and there is no ticket window. Since April 2024 Shunan City has rented the building out by the time slot, to individuals, companies and groups alike, and that rental is the ordinary way a visitor gets through the door.

The rate is 1,500 yen per slot, tax and utilities included. Slots run 9:00 to 13:00, 13:00 to 17:00, and 17:00 to 21:00, with a maximum of seven consecutive days and no lettings from 29 December to 3 January. Only the kōtei portion, the formal half used for official functions, is available: 150 square metres of the 273.70-square-metre building, on 900 square metres of the site. The private living quarters stay closed, and their lavatory is not available either.

Booking goes through the city's Facility Management Division on 0834-22-8281. Provisional reservations open at the start of the month six months before the intended date, applications are due at least one week ahead, and the key is collected in person at the city hall's fourth floor on a weekday between 8:30 and 17:15. Photography and video are among the uses the city explicitly encourages, which makes this an unusual amount of freedom inside a registered cultural property.

A few practical warnings from the city's own conditions. The building has never had a seismic assessment, and the city asks users to treat it as seismically deficient and to check escape routes before starting. Eating is allowed, drinking parties are not. No smoking anywhere on the grounds, no overnight stays, no loud instruments, no tape or pins on any surface. Groups made up entirely of people under eighteen cannot rent it.

There are also free openings. Each January, on the day of Shunan's coming-of-age ceremony, the formal half is opened without charge for commemorative photographs, with koto players performing in the rooms; no booking is needed, and on those days the site's own parking is closed in favour of Oyumichō Park, two minutes away on foot.

For everyone else, JR Tokuyama Station is roughly twenty minutes north on foot, and the Bōchō Kōtsū bus stop at Keimanchō is the nearest service. Renters may use a handful of spaces in front of the main gate and four or five inside the grounds.