Ryūeikaku (Former Nagoya Museum Appraisal Hall)

Built to judge the entries at an exposition

Ryūeikaku (Former Nagoya Museum Appraisal Hall) is a timber building of 1878 standing in the precincts of Atsuta Shrine at 1-1-1 Jingū, Atsuta Ward, Nagoya, Aichi Prefecture, and it was entered on the national register as a Registered Tangible Cultural Property on 24 April 2001. It was put up as the appraisal hall of the Nagoya Museum, the building where goods submitted to an exposition were examined and graded. The owner is the religious corporation of Atsuta Shrine.

It is two storeys of timber under tile, in a Japanese idiom, with a hipped Yosemune-zukuri roof and a floor area of 295 square metres. The Agency for Cultural Affairs record describes rooms of eighteen and sixteen and a half Tatami mats on the ground floor, a ten-mat room and an eight-mat room with a raised dais above, corridors running around all four sides, and a staircase enclosure at the rear. The master carpenter was Suzuki Kōemon.

The eight-mat room with the raised floor is the imperial seat. A dais of this kind lifts one section of the floor for a person of high rank. The room was not designed as an imperial seat; that use was added to it partway through the building's first autumn.

One afternoon in October kept the building standing

In 1878 an exposition was held at the Sōken-ji temple grounds in Nagoya to mark the opening of the Nagoya Museum. It ran fifty days, from 15 September to 3 November, and this building served as its appraisal hall.

Partway through, Emperor Meiji arrived in Nagoya on a progress through the Hokuriku and Tōkaidō regions. Atsuta Shrine records that he inspected the exposition on 26 October, and that the upper floor was fitted out as his temporary seat for the visit.

Exposition buildings usually end with the exposition. The Nagoya Museum was rebuilt in 1883 as the Aichi Prefectural Museum, and in 1910 its annexe came down to make way for a prefectural goods display hall. The appraisal hall alone was kept, as a place the emperor had been, and given the name Ryūeikaku. From then on it was used for cultural events.

It did not stay put. In 1932 a city planning scheme moved it to Shōnai Park in Nishi Ward, where it became a training hall for young people. Wartime neglect left it in poor condition, and in 1946 Nohara Shintarō, president of a Nagoya confectionery company, took it over from the prefecture and maintained it at his own expense.

In 1968, the centenary of the Meiji Restoration, Nohara presented the building to Atsuta Shrine together with about a hundred documents and objects from the Restoration period. Re-erection on the present site was completed on 3 October that year. The shrine states that the imperial seat on the upper floor survives as it was.

Without that single inspection visit, the hall would most likely have been dismantled when the exposition closed. What preserved it was not the quality of the carpentry but what happened inside it on one day.

Registered as a model of its form

Ryūeikaku (Former Nagoya Museum Appraisal Hall) became a Registered Tangible Cultural Property on 24 April 2001, on the ground that it is a model of its architectural form, under number 23-0055 in the twenty-eighth round. That is a different basis from the one used for most registered buildings in this region, which are listed for what they contribute to a streetscape. Here the form of the building itself is the reason.

The Agency for Cultural Affairs calls it a valuable survival from the early years of Japanese expositions. Expositions in the early Meiji period were an instrument of industrial policy and were held all over the country, but their halls were close to temporary structures and came down when the gates closed. A two-storey building in a Japanese idiom, with corridors on all four sides, surviving in its original role as an appraisal hall, is rare.

The plan still reads as a place for judging. The eighteen-mat and sixteen-and-a-half-mat rooms downstairs are the space where entries were laid out and people moved among them. The corridors on all four sides let visitors circulate without cutting through those rooms. The ten-mat room and the eight-mat room with the dais upstairs sit one remove above all of it.

Visiting Ryūeikaku

The plain answer first: an ordinary visit to Atsuta Shrine will not get you inside. The building stands in Magatama-en, a garden within the precincts, and the shrine's own function centre states that Magatama-en is closed to general worshippers. The building was renovated in 2012 and now serves as a wedding reception room, laid with tatami and taking parties of up to forty.

There is still a way to get close. Minamo Café, run by the shrine's function centre in what is otherwise a waiting room for garden weddings, looks out over Magatama-en. It opens from 10 a.m. to 4 p.m., with last orders at 3:30 p.m. Closing days are irregular, since it shuts whenever a wedding or a tea gathering is booked, and entry to the garden itself is not permitted.

One thing worth untangling. Kusanagi Hiroba, the landscaped area on the south side of the precincts, surrounds a different pond, Minamiji, and is open for anyone to walk through. Ryūeikaku faces Magatama Pond, which is not the same water.

Two other buildings share the garden: Matabee, an early Edo house, and Senshūkaku, a Sukiya-zukuri room of 1950. All three stand around Magatama Pond and all three are used for receptions.

Atsuta Shrine is three minutes on foot from Meitetsu Jingūmae Station, seven from JR Atsuta Station, and eight from exit 1 of Temma-chō subway station. Once inside the precincts, though, there is no route that brings you to the door, because the garden is closed. Contact the function centre before travelling if seeing the building matters to you.

On photography: since Magatama-en cannot be entered, there is no public vantage point for photographing the exterior at will. Whether pictures may be taken of the garden from Minamo Café depends on how the room is being used that day, so ask on arrival.