Sugiura Family Residence

What Is the Sugiura Family Residence?

The Sugiura Family Residence (杉浦家住宅, Sugiura-ke Jūtaku) is the former home and practice of a family of country doctors in Saijo Shinden, Showa Town, Yamanashi Prefecture, where a main house, three storage buildings from the mid-Meiji period (1883 to 1897) and a former clinic of 1929 were entered together as five Registered Tangible Cultural Property listings on August 13, 2012. Showa Town now owns the estate and runs it as a small museum, the Showa Town Fudo Densho-kan Sugiura Clinic (昭和町風土伝承館杉浦醫院).

The plot covers roughly 3,300 square meters on the flat floor of the Kofu Basin. According to the town, Kenzo Sugiura (1866 to 1933) was the eighth doctor of the line and his son Saburo (1895 to 1977) the ninth.

In 2010 the town bought the land and buildings, and the family donated everything kept inside them. Registration followed two years later. Signs and the museum itself use the old character form 醫院 for "clinic," but every registered name begins with Sugiura Family Residence.

The Doctors Who Fought the "Local Disease"

The reason this estate became a museum lies less in its carpentry than in the medicine practiced here. For generations the Kofu Basin suffered from schistosomiasis japonica, known locally simply as chihō-byō, "the local disease." A parasitic flatworm entered through the skin of anyone who waded into paddy fields or irrigation ditches, then attacked the liver.

Kenzo Sugiura noticed that villages with patients shared one feature: a small freshwater snail resembling the kawanina lived in their ditches. In 1909 he and fellow physician Junsaku Yoshioka published a paper linking that snail to the disease. In 1913 Keinosuke Miyairi confirmed the snail as the parasite's intermediate host, and the species, later named the Miyairi snail, bore out Kenzo's hunch.

Convinced that eliminating the snail was the way to end the disease, Kenzo raised ducks and firefly larvae, both snail predators, on his own grounds and released them into paddies and ponds. Saburo carried the work into the laboratory. Through animal experiments he traced how cercariae shed by the snail pass through human skin, and the town notes that researchers from the United States came to learn treatment and prevention from him.

Their campaign grew into a prefecture-wide effort to kill the snails and line some 2,000 kilometers of ditches with concrete. The governor of Yamanashi declared the epidemic over on February 19, 1996. A memorial stone marking the end of the disease stands on the grounds of the Sugiura Family Residence.

How the Estate Is Laid Out

Read together, the Agency for Cultural Affairs descriptions give a clear plan of the Sugiura Family Residence. The main house stands at the center. The former clinic sits to its east and the yashikigura, a storehouse attached to the living quarters, to its northwest. Corridors and a projecting wing (Tsunoya) run north and east from the main house, tying the storehouse and the clinic to it. Along the north edge a long storehouse runs east to west, and the barn fills the northwest corner beyond it.

• Main House (mid-Meiji period; Registration No. 19-0068)
• Former Clinic (1929; Registration No. 19-0069)
• Yashikigura (mid-Meiji period; Registration No. 19-0070)
• Storehouse (mid-Meiji period; Registration No. 19-0071)
• Barn (mid-Meiji period; Registration No. 19-0072)

The house and its storage buildings were complete by the mid-Meiji period, and the clinic was added early in the Showa era. Keeping that sequence in mind makes the site easy to read. A single corridor links the family's rooms to the consulting rooms, which is exactly what you would expect of a doctor's home.

Each of the five buildings is a Registered Tangible Cultural Property in its own right. All five were registered under the criterion of contributing to the historic landscape of the country, and the Agency describes the storehouse and barn on the north side as giving the plot the solid presence of a former landowner's estate. A Japanese garden fills the space between the buildings, with a pond you can walk around while viewing each structure from outside. Each spring, in late March, the town and a local firefly society release firefly larvae into that pond.

Visiting and Getting There

The Sugiura Family Residence is open as the Showa Town Fudo Densho-kan Sugiura Clinic from 9:30 a.m. to 4:30 p.m., with last entry at 4:00 p.m. It is closed on Saturdays, national holidays and over the New Year period. Admission is 200 yen for adults and university students and 100 yen for elementary, junior high and high school students, with 50 yen off for groups of 20 or more (checked on the official site on September 27, 2026).

The visitor route covers the clinic building, the garden and the storehouse and barn at the back. The main house is closed while the town renovates it, and no completion date has been announced (Yamanashi's official tourism site, article updated March 13, 2026).

Staff offer guided tours, mainly of the clinic building, if you apply in advance. Allow at least 60 minutes, or 90 minutes if you also watch the archival films, and note that each tour takes up to 20 people. The application form is on the official site and is sent by fax to 055-275-1400. We found no published policy on photography, so ask at the front desk.

By car the museum is about 5 minutes from the Kofu-Showa interchange of the Chuo Expressway, with parking across from the entrance. The nearest station is Kokubo on the JR Minobu Line, about 5 minutes away by taxi or roughly 30 minutes on foot. From JR Kofu Station on the Chuo Line, a taxi takes about 15 minutes.