Kamiya Family Residence Hakuroken

Three tea spaces under one roof

The Kamiya Family Residence Hakuroken (神谷家住宅柏露軒, Kamiya-ke Jūtaku Hakuroken) is a late Edo-period sukiya building in Shinsakae, Naka Ward, Nagoya City, Aichi Prefecture, registered as a National Registered Tangible Cultural Property on 13 August 2012. Single-storey timber with a floor area of 78 square metres, gabled and roofed partly in pantiles and partly in copper sheet, it stands at the centre of the plot and faces north.

The main range holds three rooms: the broad tea room called Hakuinsai, a room named Yōshitsu, and the room of the large hearth. Attached to them is Gaitei, a tea room of one mat plus a daime with a place for accompanying guests. Large room and small room are combined within a single structure.

Built at the end of the Edo period, the Kamiya Family Residence Hakuroken was moved to this site in 1911 and remodelled in 1929. Its registration number is 23-0341, the first of the four issued to this plot.

A tea setting that survived complete

The registration criterion is contribution to the historic landscape of Japan. What distinguishes this building is not only its own quality but the fact that the Koan tea room, the waiting arbor and the inner gate stand on the same ground, so the roji garden path and the tea rooms survive as a set.

Tea buildings are unusually mobile. Urban redevelopment and family relocations have repeatedly separated a tea room from its garden and carried it somewhere else. The Hakuroken range and the Koan tea room were themselves moved here in 1911. Rarely, though, is a new setting then built out with garden, gate and waiting place, and preserved in that state.

The 1929 remodelling is worth registering as well. A building of the late Edo period was moved, altered and kept in use rather than treated as a relic.

What to look for

The transom in the Hakuinsai room comes first. The Agency for Cultural Affairs describes it as a scattered-fan design in the taste of Gengensai, the mid-nineteenth-century head of the Urasenke tea school. Scattered open fans across a transom, at the level where the eye passes between rooms, create a light band of ornament just below the ceiling.

The attached Gaitei repays attention too. Adding a place for accompanying guests to a room of one mat and a daime, close to the smallest size a tea room can take, holds together the intensity of host and guest facing each other and the sociability of a wider group. The Kamiya Family Residence Hakuroken shows both the large-room and the small-room traditions of tea in one building.

The roofing is mixed, pantiles in some sections and copper sheet in others. The name of the room of the large hearth refers to the oversized hearth used in the coldest months.

Visiting and access

The Kamiya Family Residence Hakuroken is a private residence and is not open to the public. The grounds cannot be entered, and the plot is now enclosed by later buildings, so the structure is not visible from the street. Approaching the property to look or photograph is not appropriate.

The address is 2-chome Shinsakae in Naka Ward, a block about five minutes on foot east of Shinsakaemachi Station on the Higashiyama subway line. Nagoya does have sukiya buildings and tea rooms that admit visitors, and the City of Nagoya list of cultural properties identifies them. Registered examples include the tea buildings at the Kawabun restaurant in Naka Ward and the group belonging to the Tokugawa Art Museum in Higashi Ward, each with its own conditions of access.