Morikawa Family Residence Study

A Meiji reception wing facing the garden

The Morikawa Family Residence Study (森川家住宅書院, Morikawa-ke Jūtaku Shoin) is a detached reception wing of about 1902 in the Kariyasuka district of Ichinomiya, Aichi Prefecture, registered as a Registered Tangible Cultural Property on 8 July 2008. Single storeyed and timber framed, it carries a Yosemune-zukuri hipped roof of Sangawara-buki tiles over a building area of 88 square metres. It meets the main house at a right angle, joining the west end of the south veranda at the southwest corner of the compound.

The wing turns its face to the garden on the east. A wide Engawa veranda wraps the east and south sides, sheltered by an eave clad in sheet copper. The plan measures four and a half Ken by three, which is not large, but the corridor is set with a right-angled turn, so the walk from the main house to the innermost room bends once before it arrives.

The Morikawa family were substantial landholders in Kariyasuka village and ran a sake brewery from the Tenpo era of the 1830s until the end of the Meiji period. The Morikawa Family Residence Study went up in 1902, while that business was still running. It gave the household a place to receive guests on the garden side, separate from the working rooms of the house itself.

Registration, and a family known for tea

The criterion applied was contribution to the historic landscape of the country. The registration number is 23-0306, granted in the sixtieth round, with gazette notice on 23 July 2008. The main house (23-0305) and the storehouse (23-0307) were registered the same day, so the three buildings of the compound entered the national register together.

Something of this wing's character comes from one man. Morikawa Kanichiro (1887 to 1980), the twenty-first head of the family, took the name Nyoshin'an and was counted among the leading tea practitioners of the Nagoya region from the late Meiji period into the Showa era. Two tea houses once stood on the property. One, the Joshoan, was moved to Konan City and is now a municipal cultural property there; the other, named Nyoshin'an after its owner, went to Midori Ward in Nagoya. The tea houses have gone, but the Chashitsu and Mizuya built into the Morikawa Family Residence Study, and the way its rooms are appointed, keep that thread visible.

Registration differs from designation. National Treasures and Important Cultural Properties are designated under a stricter regime; the register, created in 1996, works by notification and suits buildings that remain part of a working household.

Three rooms in sequence

The interior runs as a sequence from the main house inward. First a six-mat Chashitsu with its own Mizuya preparation room, then a ten-mat antechamber, then the innermost room of eleven and a half mats. Tea room and preparation space sit in a Geya, a lower lean-to along the north face, which puts the work of making tea close to the guests without putting it in front of them.

That innermost room, called the Zangetsu no Ma, is the heart of the Morikawa Family Residence Study. Two mats of it are raised as a dais, a display alcove holds a built-in writing bay, and the flanking recess carries a low cupboard at floor level. The dais does quiet social work: whoever sits on it is physically above the guests in the next room, and the hierarchy is stated by the floor rather than by decoration. The room is said to have been modelled on the Zangetsutei, a celebrated room of the Omotesenke tea school.

The antechamber has its own Tokonoma and staggered display shelves. Two adjoining rooms, each with formal display, gave the household two grades of seating to work with depending on how many guests came and why.

The tea room ceiling is built in two levels, and its alcove follows a form associated with Omotesenke taste. Eleven and a half mats, ten mats, six mats: the rooms step down in size as you move through them, and the ceiling treatment steps with them. Anyone who gets to see inside the Morikawa Family Residence Study should watch that relationship between floor area and headroom.

Visiting

This building is part of a private, occupied house, and the interior is closed. There are no open days and no appointment system. Because the wing stands at the back of the compound facing its garden, even the exterior is largely hidden from the road. A visitor to the site should expect to see the main house and the storehouse from the street and nothing of the Morikawa Family Residence Study itself.

Photography is limited to what is visible from the public road. Do not enter the property or shoot over the wall or fence.

The nearest station is Kariyasuka on the Meitetsu Bisai Line, about 600 metres southwest of the compound, roughly 8 minutes on foot. From Meitetsu Ichinomiya it is the second stop, after Kannonji. The station is unstaffed and has no information counter. Enquiries about the property go to the museum administration section of Ichinomiya City on 0586-46-3215.

For anyone following the family's tea connection instead, the Joshoan tea house that Kanichiro kept here now stands in Konan City as a designated municipal cultural property. Its opening arrangements are a matter for Konan City rather than for this address.