Former Shoden-in Shoin

A Tea Master's Retreat Beside the Kiso River

East of Inuyama Castle, in a strolling garden called Urakuen, two buildings stand side by side under the trees. The smaller, the teahouse Jo-an, is a National Treasure and draws most of the attention. Its neighbour, the Former Shōden-in Shoin, is the larger of the pair and an Important Cultural Property in its own right. The distinction matters: the teahouse holds the higher rank, but the residence beside it carries its own history and its own art.

A shoin is a formal residential and reception building, floored in tatami and opening onto verandas. This one is laid out as a seven-mat room with a tokonoma alcove, together with four six-mat rooms and the surrounding edge of veranda. It stands a single story under a hip-and-gable roof now finished in copper plate. The building dates to around 1618, the fourth year of the Genna era.

It was raised as the retirement quarters of Oda Urakusai, also known as Oda Nagamasu, a younger brother of the warlord Oda Nobunaga. Urakusai studied tea under Sen no Rikyū and is counted among his foremost pupils. He built the residence next to his teahouse within the Shōden-in subtemple of Kennin-ji in Kyoto, and the two have travelled together ever since.

Why the Shoin Was Designated

The residence entered the national register on 5 September 1944. Part of its value is architectural, as an early Edo example of a tea master's living quarters built to sit comfortably beside a celebrated teahouse. The main room on the south side is composed so that it could serve as a tea room as readily as a reception space, a flexibility that suited a man who shaped his daily life around the practice of tea.

The other part of its value is what survives on the walls. The sliding panels inside carry paintings attributed to Hasegawa Tōhaku and Kanō Sansetsu, names that place the interior among the significant holdings of early-modern Japanese painting. These works are not normally open for close interior viewing, though the building can be seen from the garden side, where its restrained outline reads clearly against the planting.

The shoin's later life reads like a map of changing owners. It left Kyoto for a Mitsui residence in Tokyo in the late Meiji years, moved on to a Mitsui villa at Ōiso, and in 1972 came to Inuyama when Nagoya Railroad acquired the buildings and laid out the present garden under the architect Sutemi Horiguchi. The garden took its name, Urakuen, from Urakusai himself.

What to Look For on a Visit

Approach from the garden and let the eye move between the two buildings. The teahouse is compact and inward-turning; the shoin is broader and calmer, its veranda inviting a longer pause. In autumn the maples along that veranda are a particular pleasure, and the soft warp of the old window glass elsewhere in the garden rewards a second glance.

Urakuen reopened in 2022 after a period of closure for repairs, and it sits within easy reach of Inuyama Castle, itself a National Treasure. A combined walk takes in the castle keep, the riverside, and this quiet corner where a sixteenth-century courtier-turned-tea-master arranged his last years. Opening hours and any tea service in the garden change with the season, so the current schedule is worth checking before a visit.