Shunkoin Tea Room

The Tea Room of Shunkoin: A Bamboo Hut by a Local Master

West of the shoin stands the smallest registered building at Shunkoin, a grass-hut tea room of barely four mats once the alcove is counted in. It was built in the late Meiji period by Shimomura Mitsuyoshi, who took the studio name Saigyoan and founded the Bishu Hisada school of tea. He was born in Odaka in 1833, which makes this tea room the work of a local hand rather than an import from Kyoto.

Mitsuyoshi learned the Hisada line of tea, a branch tied by marriage to the Sen family of Kyoto, and carried it through the lean years after the Meiji Restoration when many tea houses lost their patrons. He was also a painter and a designer of tea gardens, and the garden within the temple precinct is attributed to him as well. The tea room and the garden read as two halves of one sensibility.

Shunkoin is a Soto Zen temple founded in 1556 by the lord of Odaka Castle in memory of his father. Its grounds came through the Pacific War unburned, and the tea room is one of seven structures here entered on the national register in July 2005.

Why the Tea Room Was Registered

The building covers about fifteen square meters, a single-story timber structure with a bark-shingled roof. Its registration recognizes a small, intact example of an Owari tea house built by a named master in his own idiom. The interior holds roughly four mats once the alcove is added, modest by design, since the grass-hut style values restraint over display.

What sets the room apart is its sustained use of bamboo. The bark roof is pinned down by a lattice of bamboo laid in a grid. Bamboo does not stop at the roof. The battens of the saobuchi ceiling are bamboo, and so are the rafters and the lathing of the exposed decorative eaves, the kesho-yaneura. The result is a single material carried through structure and finish, giving the small space an unusual coherence.

What to Look For on a Visit

Bamboo is everywhere worth following with the eye. Trace it from the grid that holds the roof down to the slender battens overhead and the rafters of the open eaves. In most tea rooms bamboo appears as an accent. Here it sets the rhythm of the whole interior, and the effect is quiet rather than showy.

Pair the tea room with the garden when you visit, since both are attributed to Mitsuyoshi and were meant to be experienced together. The room is small and not always open to the public, so confirm access with the temple beforehand. Seen alongside the larger halls, it shows how a Zen temple could hold a private world of tea at the edge of its grounds.