The wooden theatre in Uchiko where visitors are allowed beneath the stage

The limited express from Matsuyama reaches Uchiko in about twenty-five minutes, and most people who step off walk uphill toward the old merchant street. Below it, on a quiet stretch of road, stands a two-storey wooden building with a deep gabled roof and no queue outside. It is a theatre finished in 1916, and on days without a performance you can leave your shoes at the entrance, walk onto the stage, and then go underneath it.

A building that kept being useful

Uchiko-za (内子座) went up while the town was still rich, and it stayed in service long after the money moved elsewhere, including a stretch as a cinema. It was restored in 1985 rather than cleared, which is why the room still has the proportions of a small Taishō-era playhouse instead of a museum's idea of one.

The floor is laid out in masu-seki (枡席), square tatami boxes divided by low wooden rails that you step over rather than walk between. A balcony runs around three sides, and the hanamichi (花道) cuts across the floor toward the back of the room, so an entrance arrives through the audience instead of past it.

Under the floor

A staircase near the stage drops into the naraku (奈落), the space below, where the timber is unplaned and the air is several degrees cooler. The revolving stage is turned from here by hand, by pushing against beams worn smooth, and a trapdoor called the suppon (スッポン) opens into the hanamichi above.

Nothing below the stage is powered. Every effect the audience sees is someone walking in a circle in the dark.

The street that paid for it

Ten minutes uphill, the Yōkaichi-Gokoku (八日市護国) district runs for roughly six hundred metres of plastered merchant houses in ochre and white, with lattice fronts and deep eaves. The money came from mokurō (木蠟), wax pressed from the berries of the haze tree, and the Kami-Haga residence at the top of the street still holds the presses and vats.

Trains on the Yosan line are infrequent enough that it pays to check the return before you settle in, and the theatre closes in the late afternoon. Come on a weekday and you may have the whole room to yourself, which is the condition it was least designed for and looks best in.

木蠟で栄えた町が、芝居小屋をひとつ残した。