Shunan City Mayor's Official Residence, Japanese Wing

The 238 Square Metres Where Someone Actually Lived

The Japanese Wing of the Shunan City Mayor's Official Residence (周南市市長公舎和館, Shunan-shi Shichō Kōsha Wakan, also romanised Shunan-shi Shicho Kosha Wakan) 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.

Visitors tend to photograph the western half of this compound, the one with the steep gable and the half-timbering. The eastern half is six and a half times larger. At 238 square metres of building area against the western wing's 36, this is where the household ate, bathed, slept and received guests on tatami, and it is the reason the compound reads as a house rather than as an entrance pavilion.

The building went up as part of the official residence of the director of the Tokuyama Naval Fuel Depot, finished on 24 February 1926. February 2026 therefore marked its hundredth year. Its second life began in February 1946, when the third mayor of the old city of Tokuyama moved in under a temporary-use permit from the Ministry of Finance; the city bought the property outright on 28 April 1950. Mayors of Tokuyama, and after the 2003 municipal merger mayors of Shunan, lived here until the residence was retired from that role in 2011.

Locally the compound is now called Kyū Shichō Kōsha (旧市長公舎), the former mayor's residence.

Registered as a Model of Design

Japan's registration system for Tangible Cultural Properties, established by a 1996 revision of the Cultural Properties Protection Act, works through three criteria. A building may qualify by contributing to the historic landscape of the nation, by being difficult to reproduce, or by serving as a model of design. The Japanese wing was registered on the third of these, as number 35-0063. The western wing, assessed separately on the same day, took the landscape criterion instead.

Reading that criterion tells you what the reviewers were looking at. Not rarity, not a famous architect, but typicality of a high order: a well-built example of the kindai wafū jūtaku, the modern Japanese-style house that took shape between the 1900s and the 1930s. The Agency for Cultural Affairs summary calls it a quality example of that type in plain language.

What makes it typical is the plan. Formal rooms face south and west, arranged in the shoin manner that a Meiji or Taishō official would have recognised at a glance. Family life is pushed east, behind a nakarōka, a central corridor running through the house that lets servants and family circulate without crossing the reception rooms. That corridor is the diagnostic feature of a whole generation of Japanese housing, and this house has a clear, unaltered version of it.

Shunan City frames the same division historically. When this was a naval residence, the block connecting to the western wing served as official space, and the rear volume to the east was where the family actually lived. The paying public today can rent the first of those and not the second.

No architect has been confirmed. Yamaguchi Prefecture's cultural property database records only that the design is thought to have come from the construction section of the Kure Naval District.

Roofs, Ranma and a Single Long Log

Look at the roof first, ideally from the garden on the south side. The main ridge runs east to west under a hipped roof (yosemune-zukuri). Off it come a dropped gabled roof, further hipped sections, and a ryōsage roof, which pitches to two sides without gable ends and is used where one volume runs into another. The result is a roofscape that changes shape every few metres. It is the least symmetrical thing about the building and the most rewarding to stand and work out.

The formal rooms sit on the west. A ten-mat zashiki carries the full set of shoin fittings: a toko (the raised alcove for a hanging scroll), tana (built-in staggered shelving beside it), and a hira-shoin, a study window set flush with the wall rather than projecting outward as the more elaborate tsuke-shoin does. Beyond it lies a second ten-mat room, the tsugi-no-ma, so that the two open into one long space when the sliding partitions come out. The entrance projects from this block.

Above the partitions between those two rooms are the ranma, the transom panels that sit between the lintel and the ceiling. The city singles them out as decorative, and they are the place where a builder working to a naval budget was allowed to show craft. Ranma ventilate and light the rooms; they also tell you how much the client cared.

Then there is the south corridor, which is the detail worth crossing the country for if you like timber. The engawa girder is a single long round log, used as it came rather than squared. Straight logs of that length in that quality are close to unobtainable now, and the city's own notes flag the beam as such.

East of the corridor, in what was the private half, are the bathroom, the kitchen and the family rooms. That side is not open.

The whole compound, western and Japanese wings together, comes to 273.70 square metres of floor area on a site of 1,685.21 square metres. A garden with a pond spreads to the south, and the front court holds a shinji-ike, a pond cut to the outline of the character 心, now drained. In fiscal 2007 the city carried out the first major repair the building had received since 1926, completing the work in March 2008; registration followed that October.

Renting the Tatami Rooms

Since April 2024 the tatami rooms have been available to anyone willing to book them. Shunan City lets the formal half of the compound by time slot at 1,500 yen per slot, tax and utilities included, to individuals, groups and companies. The slots run 9:00 to 13:00, 13:00 to 17:00 and 17:00 to 21:00, up to seven consecutive days, with no lettings from 29 December to 3 January.

Tea gatherings are one of the uses the city had in mind, and the fittings reflect it: an electric brazier for tea is installed in the tatami rooms, along with air conditioning in both the Japanese and Western rooms, a kitchen with an induction hob and refrigerator, two low tables, nine narrow floor desks and eight stools. The rentable area is 150 square metres of the building and 900 square metres of the grounds. The private living quarters and their lavatory stay closed.

Bookings go to the city's Facility Management Division on 0834-22-8281. Provisional reservations open at the beginning of the month six months before the date wanted, applications close a week ahead, and keys are collected in person on the fourth floor of the city hall on a weekday between 8:30 and 17:15. Photography and filming are explicitly welcomed, which is not the norm inside registered buildings.

Two cautions from the city's conditions. No seismic assessment has been carried out, so users are asked to treat the building as seismically deficient and to check escape routes on arrival. Food is permitted, drinking parties are not, and the grounds are non-smoking throughout, with no overnight stays, no loud instruments and nothing taped or pinned to any surface.

Free openings happen too. Each January, on the day of the city's coming-of-age ceremony, the formal rooms are opened without charge for commemorative photographs, with koto performances in the tatami rooms and no booking required. On those days visitors park at Oyumichō Park, two minutes away.

JR Tokuyama Station, a Sanyō Shinkansen stop, lies about twenty minutes north on foot; the Keimanchō bus stop on the Bōchō Kōtsū network is nearer. Renters may use a handful of spaces at the front gate and four or five inside the grounds, entering from the road on the western side.