Sugiura Family Residence Former Clinic

What Is the Sugiura Family Residence Former Clinic?

The Sugiura Family Residence Former Clinic (杉浦家住宅旧医院, Sugiura-ke Jūtaku Kyū-iin) is a country doctor's clinic built in 1929 in Saijo Shinden, Showa Town, Yamanashi Prefecture, and was entered as a Registered Tangible Cultural Property on August 13, 2012. It is the building where Kenzo Sugiura and his son Saburo treated and studied schistosomiasis japonica, the parasitic infection that Yamanashi people called simply "the local disease."

The clinic stands on the east side of the family plot, linked to the main house to its west by a corridor. It is a wooden building, partly 2 storeys high, with a footprint of 145 square meters, and the Agency for Cultural Affairs classes it as a purpose-built medical building with a dispensary and other working rooms inside.

One point on dating. The Agency's database gives 1929, while the museum's own website describes the clinic as built between the Taisho and early Showa eras. This article follows the Agency's date.

Why It Was Registered

The Sugiura Family Residence Former Clinic was registered for contributing to the historic landscape of the country. On an estate otherwise made of tiled farmhouse roofs and earthen storehouses, this is the one building finished in tinted Shikkui plaster and pierced by a run of tall, narrow windows. Seen beside the mid-Meiji main house, it reads instantly as an early Showa clinic, and that contrast is the core of its value in the landscape.

Its second strength is that it still looks like a working clinic. When Showa Town bought the property in 2010, the family donated everything inside, from instruments to medicine bottles. The reception window, consulting room and dispensary remain where they were, so the Sugiura Clinic serves both as architecture and as a primary record of the fight against the disease.

What to Look For

Pinkish Plaster and Tall Windows

Start with the color of the walls. The plaster is not white but carries a faint reddish tint. Below it, the lower wall is rendered in mortar dragged with a brush to leave a rough texture, and above that the vertical windows march along at regular intervals. The roof is traditionally Japanese, but the walls and windows follow the vocabulary of a Western-style surgery.

Two Hip-and-Gable Roofs

The building combines a 2-storey block roofed in Irimoya-zukuri style with its ridge running east to west and a single-storey block in the same style with its ridge running north to south. A porch with its own hip-and-gable roof projects to the south. From the south side of the garden you can see all three roofs step down against one another.

The English Signboard

On either side of the entrance hang a signboard reading "Dr. Sugiura's Office Physician" and a nameplate reading 杉浦醫院 in the old form of the characters. Both are said to date from the clinic's working years. Pause at the door to compare the two, the English board facing the Japanese one across the entrance.

Consulting Room and Dispensary

Inside, the highlights are the consulting room where patients were treated and the dispensary with its shelves of medicine bottles, among them Stibnal, an antimony drug once used against schistosomiasis. A grand piano stands in the consulting room; according to the museum, it is one of a limited run made in Japan in 1933 to celebrate the birth of the crown prince.

Visiting the Former Clinic

Of the five registered buildings, the Sugiura Family Residence Former Clinic is the one you can explore properly inside. You can walk from the reception through the consulting room to the dispensary, and the staff-led guided tours, which must be booked in advance, focus mainly on this building.

Upstairs, a study space shows archival films on the disease. The museum's own introduction, "Welcome to the Sugiura Clinic," runs about 16 minutes and explains the doctors' work and how the infection spread. Watching it after your walk through the rooms helps the exhibits fall into place.

For the exterior, stand on the south side, where the porch projects and the English signboard can be read. We found no published policy on photography inside, so please ask at reception (checked September 27, 2026).