Former Main House of the Kawakami Sadayakko Residence

The House Momosuke Built for Sadayakko

The building sits on a quiet residential street in the Higashi ward of Nagoya, its mansard roof of red tile rising above the wooden walls in a shape borrowed from early twentieth-century Europe rather than from a Japanese castle town. This is the Former Kawakami Sadayakko Residence, Main Building (Kyu Kawakami Sadayakko-tei Shuoku), put up around 1920 for one of the most talked-about couples of Japan's Taisho era.

The actress Kawakami Sadayakko (1871-1946) and the industrialist Fukuzawa Momosuke (1868-1938) shared this house from 1920 until about 1926. Momosuke, an adopted son-in-law of the great educator Fukuzawa Yukichi, had built his fortune developing hydroelectric power along the Kiso River and was known across the country as the "electric power king." He ordered the house from Ameriya, a Tokyo firm that specialized in modern, Western-influenced homes, and the finished mansion was grand enough that neighbours called it the Futaba Palace (Futaba Goten), after Higashi-futaba-cho, the district where it first stood.

The surviving part of that mansion was later moved roughly half a kilometre to the Shumokucho district. After the building was donated to the city, it was dismantled, rebuilt at its present site between 2004 and 2005, and opened to the public in February 2005 as the Cultural Path Futaba Museum (Bunka no Michi Futaba-kan).

Why the Building Is Protected

The main building carries the status of a Registered Tangible Cultural Property. This is a lighter form of national protection than the designation given to National Treasures and Important Cultural Properties. Introduced in 1996, the register is meant to safeguard buildings, often close to a century old, that give a place its character, while still allowing owners to use and adapt them. The main building and a separate storehouse on the grounds were both entered on the register in February 2005, the day after the museum opened its doors.

What makes the house worth keeping is the way it folds two architectural worlds into a single structure. The eastern part is a Western-style wing holding the entrance hall, a reception room, and a dining room. Beyond it, on both floors, lie Japanese rooms, among them Sadayakko's private chamber and a tea room. The red-tile mansard roof was raised to make space for the upper storey. Rough textured stucco covers the second-floor exterior and wooden shingles clad the first, so the facade shifts in surface and material as the eye travels up it. The wooden two-storey building covers about 71 square metres.

What to Look For Inside

The room most visitors remember is the large hall, where stained glass scatters coloured light across the floor. The panels were produced from designs by Sugiura Hisui, an early figure in modern Japanese graphic design, and a curving staircase rises nearby toward a high ceiling. Because Momosuke made his living in electricity, the house was wired for electric lighting and fitted with decorative fixtures at a time when both were still rare in a private home. Period lamps and furnishings stand throughout the rooms.

The museum also recounts Sadayakko's own unusual life. Born in the Nihonbashi district of Tokyo and trained as a geisha in the Yoshicho quarter, she married the stage actor Kawakami Otojiro and travelled with his company to the United States and Europe, where she first appeared on stage as a performer. At the Paris Exposition of 1900 she drew large crowds and a decoration from the French government, and European artists, the sculptor Auguste Rodin among them, sought her company. She is widely remembered as Japan's first modern actress. Panels, photographs, and personal belongings follow her path from the stage to her later years in Nagoya.

One wing serves a second purpose. It is Nagoya's only museum devoted to modern and contemporary literature, gathering the papers and work of local writers, the dramatist and novelist Tsubouchi Shoyo foremost among them.

Around the Museum

The museum anchors the eastern end of the Cultural Path (Bunka no Michi), a run of historic streets stretching from Nagoya Castle toward the Tokugawa-en garden. In the Edo period this was a quarter of samurai houses. From the Meiji period onward it filled with the homes of industrialists, ceramics exporters, and journalists, and several of those houses still stand. A short walk away are the Cultural Path Shumoku-kan, once a ceramics merchant's home, and the former Toyoda Sasuke Residence, tied to the family behind Toyota. The handsome brick Nagoya City Archives sits close by, and the Tokugawa-en garden with its adjoining art museum lies a little further east.

The museum is about a ten-minute walk from Takaoka Station on the Sakura-dori subway line. The Meguru sightseeing loop bus stops directly outside, which makes the house an easy first or last stop on a day spent along the Cultural Path.