Another four-room minka layout this week: the Ishibe family (Ishibe-ke 石部家) residence in Yamagata Prefecture. Of its four rooms, three are used as zashiki (ざしき); the idoko (いどこ), in contrast, is the multi-purpose room for family activities. The Ishibe house is a regular four-room layout (seikei yon-madori 整形四間取り), though the idoko and lower front zashiki together have significant use characteristics of a single hiroma, suggestive of a three-room hiroma-type (hiroma-gata 広間型) layout. Further, the layout is in kagi-zashiki style (kagi-zashiki keishiki 鍵座敷形式), with upper rear kagi-zashiki (鍵座敷, lit. ‘key zashiki’), here called the oku-zashiki (おくざしき, lit. ‘rear zashiki’). Kagi-zashiki in this type of L-plan are often seen in regular six-room (seikei roku-madori 整形六間取り) layouts.

This house is a han-nо̄ shо̄ka (半濃商家, lit. ‘half farming commerce house’, presumably meaning that it was the residence of part-time farmer who was also engaged in commerce) in the hot spring resort town of Shimobe (Shimobe Onsen下部温泉) in Yamagata Prefecture, but the layout seems to indicate that it also served as an inn for paying travellers when the need arose. The three zashiki are connected by a returning or wrap-around ‘verandah’ (mawari-en 回り縁), and there is a shoin (書院) in the oku-zashiki.

The shoin is one of the design elements of better-appointed zashiki. It flanks the decorative alcove (tokonoma 床の間 or toko とこ), and in its most typical form consists of a low ‘sill’ or bench (shoin kо̄-ita 書院甲板) below a lattice window (shoin koushi 書院格子) that functions to bring more natural light to the toko, which is often at the rear of the zashiki and so away from the main exterior opening and source of light. As the characters 書院 (lit. ‘book institution’) suggest, the shoin began as a kind of desk or ‘study’ in the classical and medieval villas of nobles and samurai; shoin were so closely associated with this ‘high’ style of residential architecture that the style itself came to be known as shoin-zukuri (書院造り, lit. ‘shoin construction’). As the Ishibe house shows, the shoin eventually ‘trickled down’ into the minka of relatively well-to-do Edo period farmers and merchants.

A shoin that projects out from the plane of its wall into the verandah (engawa 縁側) or corridor (rо̄ka 廊下) is known as a tsuke-shoin (付書院, lit. ‘attached shoin’), de-shoin (出書院, lit. ‘projecting shoin’), or akari-shoin (明かり書院, lit. ‘lantern shoin’); one that is in the same plane as its wall, and thus lacks a shoin kо̄-ita, is called a hira-shoin (平書院, lit. ‘flat shoin’). Typically, the former are found in more formal zashiki, and the latter in less formal zashiki. In this case, the shoin is of the projecting type, and is called akadoko (あかどこ), a dialectical variant of akari-doko (明り床), meaning the same as akari-shoin.