Ito Family Residence Waiting Arbour

Three and a bit square metres on the national register

The Ito Family Residence Waiting Arbour (伊藤家住宅腰掛待合, Itō-ke Jūtaku Koshikake Machiai) is a garden shelter of 1948 at 4-84 Tachibanacho, Tsushima, Aichi Prefecture, entered on the national register of Registered Tangible Cultural Properties (Structures) on 28 April 2009. It is a single-storey timber structure roofed in sheet copper, and its floor area is 3.2 square metres.

The dimensions are 2.7 metres along the ridge and 1.2 metres across. That is about the footprint of two tatami mats, which puts it among the smallest buildings on the national register. It stands partway along the west side of the garden.

A Koshikake-machiai is where guests invited to a tea gathering sit while they wait for the signal to enter. It is closer to garden equipment than to architecture, and it does not close itself in; the point is to sit outdoors under cover. The Ito Family Residence Waiting Arbour has walls on three sides only, with the fourth left open to the garden.

Younger than the tea house it serves

The Ito Family Residence Waiting Arbour dates from 1948. That is the same year the tea house Suikeian, in the same garden, was moved here from the Sano family estate at Yatomi. When a tea room built in 1868 arrived in Tsushima after eighty years, this shelter was made new to go with it.

Moving a tea room does not by itself produce a tea gathering. The path guests walk from the gate to the room, the place they pause along the way, the position of the basin where they rinse their hands: these make up the Roji, the tea garden, and the sequence of actions only holds together when all of it is present. The Ito Family Residence Waiting Arbour appears to have been built as part of a roji laid out afresh for the relocated tea room.

The Agency for Cultural Affairs record reads it the same way, describing the shelter as forming a quiet roji together with Suikeian. It is assessed by the role it plays in the garden rather than as a free-standing building.

The registration criterion is the one covering buildings that serve as a model of design. The register number is 23-0318 and the gazette notice appeared on 14 May 2009. Suikeian was registered on the same day under the same criterion, which shows the two being handled as a single tea garden.

The interest is in the choice of materials

Go through the Ito Family Residence Waiting Arbour detail by detail and the material choices turn out to be the design.

The roof is Maneki-yane, a gable form in which the ridge is set off-centre so that one slope runs longer than the other. On a building this small the roof shape carries most of the impression, and that asymmetry is what you register on approach. The covering is sheet copper, matching Suikeian across the garden.

The frame is built mainly from round logs, left with the curve of the tree rather than squared at a saw. The eave Taruki rafters are bamboo. Bamboo instead of timber was a favoured move in tea architecture, and it puts a row of thin light lines along the eave edge.

Three walls are earth plaster, and the wall on the right is pierced by a Shitaji-mado. This kind of window is made by leaving part of the bamboo and reed armature of the wall unplastered, so that the opening comes from work not done rather than from a frame set into the wall. In a building the size of the Ito Family Residence Waiting Arbour, that single window decides nearly the whole character of the wall surface.

Round logs, bamboo, earth plaster, an exposed armature. None of it is costly. The tea aesthetic of letting materials show what they are fits into 3.2 square metres without any of it feeling compressed.

Visiting

The Ito Family Residence Waiting Arbour stands in the garden of a private house and should be treated as closed. Neither the Agency for Cultural Affairs database nor the Tsushima City heritage page records opening days, a booking arrangement or an admission charge.

Standing on the west side of the garden, it cannot readily be seen from a public road, and the grounds may not be entered. A special opening or a tea gathering could conceivably provide access, so anyone planning a trip should ask Tsushima City Hall first on 0567-24-1111. The city publishes its heritage records in a digital archive called the History and Cultural Heritage of Tsushima.

Photography needs the owner's permission, since the building is inside a private garden.

The address is 4-84 Tachibanacho, about one kilometre southwest of Tsushima Station on the Meitetsu Tsushima and Bisai lines, roughly fifteen minutes on foot. The Ito Family Residence Teahouse Suikeian occupies the same garden less than 15 metres away, the shelter partway down the west side and the tea house in the southwest corner.