Regionality of Farmhouse Building Constitution and its Genesis in Tohoku

Abstract

Although some dynamic aspects in Japanese farmhouse building constitition have been studied in disciplines of settlement geography and architecture, the regional understanding of such aspects is not sufficient yet from the viewpoint of comparalive geography. This paper is an inquiry into genetical processes of regional types of farmhouse building constitution in Tohoku, northeastern Japan. The author examinedthe present aspects and the changing processes of farmhouse building constitution in some investigation villages selected from two major regions, the central part of Iwate Prefecture and the Aizu District, and further compared them to those in the Sendai Plain discussed formerly.Each region has a characteristic pattern in building constitution. In the Sendai Plain farmhouses have usually many attached buildings, to whih various functions are distributed. On the contrary, in Aizu District they have relatively few attached buildings and farm functions are concentrated in Sagyosha (workshop or barn), the main attached building. Central Iwate is intermediate between above two regions concerning the number of attached buildings and the space of Sagyosha floor. The present author identified from these patterns three regional types of building constitution in Tohoku; multi-building type in Sendai Plain, mono-building type in Aizu and intermediate type in central Iwate.Each of these regional types has appeared in the process separation of attached buildings at two stages. The first stage occured before World War II. Multibuilding type in Sendai Plain is considered to have been established by the Taisho Period (1912-1925). In the central Iwate and Aizu, a considerable number of Sagyoshas were built at first from the 1910's to the 1930's. Through these decades the building constitution began to be differenciated from region to region. The second stage occured after World war II. Since 1955 a great number of Sagyoshas and other attached buildings have been added anywhere in Tohoku. Through this period the present charcters of each regional type were established.These two stages were respectively under different socio-economic conditions. The separation of Sagyosha in the first stage was caused by the spread of treadle and power thrashers. The construction of various attached buildings in the second stage was a resullt of the recent large scale mechanization in agriculture. The main house itself changed from dirt floor to plate floor in domaniwa hall in the first stage and in the second stage it was wholly rebuilt in large scale. As a result of the rebuilding, the peculiar traditional house types such as Nanbumagariya and Chumonzukuri were almost lost in the investigation villages. The above changes proceeded in the first stage mainly among comparative by upper class farmers, but in the second stage they spread into lower classes.Differences in those regional types are considered to have been brought about primarily by climatic conditions. Namely, in Aizu under snowy winter climate various functions are agglomerated in a few buildings for daily convenience and house-building difficulties. It might he necessary to further consider the relationships to agricultural structure and folk practice etc.