Nagoya City Tozanso Garden Gate and Wall

What Nagoya City Tozanso Garden Gate and Wall Is

Nagoya City Tozanso Garden Gate and Wall (名古屋市東山荘庭門及び塀, also written Tōzansō) is an early Showa-era gate and wall in Hatsujimachi, Mizuho Ward, Nagoya, Aichi Prefecture, entered on the national register as a Registered Tangible Cultural Property on 21 June 2013. The gate is timber with a cedar-bark roof and a frontage of 1.2 meters; the wall is timber with sheet-iron roofing and runs 19 meters in total.

It sits inside the estate rather than at its edge. The wall leaves the southeast corner of the main house at a right angle, and the gate opens partway along it. Where the main gate at the southeast corner of the grounds separates the villa from the street, this one handles a boundary between two gardens: the front garden and the inner one.

The work dates from the early Showa era, between 1926 and 1945, later than the main house, whose construction began around 1912.

Why It Was Registered

Registration as a Registered Tangible Cultural Property rests on one criterion, that the structure contributes to the historic landscape of the country. What the Agency for Cultural Affairs singles out about Nagoya City Tozanso Garden Gate and Wall is its role in dividing the front garden from the inner garden loosely, shaping the garden as a sequence of spaces. It was built to compose a view, not to block one.

The gate is an udegi-mon, a type in which brackets project fore and aft from the posts to carry the roof beam. Above sits a Kirizuma-zukuri gable roof clad in cedar bark. Bark laid in overlapping courses has none of the hardness of tile or copper; it reads closer to the trees around it.

The wall is finished differently on its two faces. Outward, it repeats the main gate's treatment, packed to waist height with bamboo split and beaten flat. Toward the inner garden it is boarded in cedar. A plastered panel above carries a long horizontal window, and the roof is sheet iron. One wall, two faces.

Set beside the main gate, the grading of materials becomes legible. The main gate has a 3.0-meter frontage under thatch, with a copper-roofed wall running 32 meters. This one has a 1.2-meter frontage under cedar bark, with a sheet-iron wall of 19 meters. Weight and formality at the street; lighter materials once inside, where the structure has to sit within the planting.

What to Look For

The dimension itself is the point. Nagoya City Tozanso Garden Gate and Wall measures 1.2 meters across, barely wider than one person. Arriving from the 3.0-meter main gate, a visitor is funnelled through a narrow opening before the inner garden widens out again. The pinch is deliberate staging.

Get close to the cedar bark. The edges overlap unevenly and the colour deepens in rain. Cedar-bark roofing turns up often around tea houses, which suits a villa whose grounds hold two Roji approach gardens.

The bracket construction shows plainly at the sides of the posts. A horizontal arm projects from each post to carry the purlin, and the roof rests on that. The main gate uses supporting posts instead, so it needs more timber to do the same job.

Walk both sides of the wall. The outer face is a run of bamboo, the inner face a run of cedar boards, and it takes an effort to accept that these are the same wall. Through the horizontal window above, a narrow strip of the garden on the far side comes into view.

What this gate and wall divide is one of the joints between the villa's four gardens: the entrance forecourt, the garden facing the reception room, and a tea garden for each of the two tea houses, all held within natural woodland. Noticing which garden you are standing in, before and after passing through, is the clearest way to read what the structure does.

Visiting

Nagoya City Tozanso Garden Gate and Wall stands outdoors within the grounds, and the garden is free to enter. Opening hours run from 9:00 a.m. to 4:00 p.m. The villa building itself is open 9:00 a.m. to 4:30 p.m. and closes on Mondays, moving to the following non-holiday weekday when a Monday is a public holiday, and from 29 December to 3 January.

Photography in the tea-garden paths and the front garden is permitted. Pets may not be brought into the garden. Occasional closures for maintenance occur, so anyone travelling a distance should check ahead.

Two routes reach the site. From Mizuho Kuyakusho Station on the Sakura-dori subway line, leave by exit 1 and walk 12 minutes east. By city bus, take route Kanayama 16 or Sakae 20 to Tanabe-dori 2-chome and walk 5 minutes west. The entrance to the grounds is on the east side. Parking is limited, and public transport is recommended.

Operation is in the hands of the Nagoya City Cultural Promotion Agency as designated manager, whose website carries the events calendar and closure notices.