Takagi Family Residence Tea House

A small tea room behind a merchant's house in Inuyama

The Takagi Family Residence Tea House (髙木家住宅茶室, Takagi-ke Jūtaku Chashitsu) is a Chashitsu of the early Taishō era, between 1912 and 1925, standing in the rear garden of the Takagi house on Honmachi Street in Inuyama City, Aichi Prefecture, and it was listed as a Registered Tangible Cultural Property (structure) on 23 July 2004. It is a single-story timber building with a Kirizuma-zukuri roof of Sangawara-buki tiles, and it covers only 23 square meters.

The building sits toward the north side of the rear garden. An open veranda called a nure-en, laid outside the line of the exterior doors, links it to the main house, so the family could reach the tea room without changing footwear. A copper-sheeted eave hangs over that veranda, which wraps around the building.

The tea room itself is a four-and-a-half-mat plan with a daime. A daime is a shortened Tatami mat, about three quarters of a full one, and the host's serving position is set on that reduced module. On the east side there is an alcove one daime wide with a small opening known as a horaguchi. The west and south walls each carry a Shitaji-mado, a window formed by leaving part of the bamboo lath bare instead of covering it with plaster.

The posts are migaki-maruta, logs stripped of bark and polished, standing round rather than squared. The main house was framed with sawn timber. The choice of material alone separates the two buildings.

East of the tea room is a three-mat room, and a Mizuya preparation area sits under the eaves. Guest seating, serving position and washing-up space all fit inside 23 square meters.

Registered as a model of design

The criterion applied to the Takagi Family Residence Tea House was that the building provides a model of design. The main house and the storehouse, listed on the same day, were registered on a different ground: their contribution to the historic landscape of the country. For the tea house the judgement was about the making of the building itself.

Polished log posts, a serving position framed on the daime module, windows that expose their own bamboo lath. These are the working conventions of Sukiya-zukuri tea architecture, and a carpenter in Inuyama in the early Taishō years assembled them without loosening any of them.

Tea drinking had long been part of daily life in this castle town. Inuyama City's plan for the maintenance of historic scenery records that tea culture had settled into the lives of townspeople, and notes that the Takagi family, sake brewers trading under the name Watazen, kept a tea room and received visitors in it. Other merchant houses in the town kept tea rooms of their own. The Takagi Family Residence Tea House shows the same practice from the merchant side of the street.

What makes this tea house worth knowing about

Begin with the numbers. At 23 square meters, the tea house is roughly one eighth the floor area of the 190 square meter main house of 1913. One building presents a formal face to the street; the other closes in on itself at the back of the plot. The same household built both.

The connection between them repays attention. There is no roofed corridor. A nure-en veranda, open to the weather, carries a guest the few steps from the house to the tea room, and those few steps in the open air are the transition into the tea gathering.

The openings are placed with intent. Both Shitaji-mado face west and south, the directions of afternoon light, while the alcove on the east sits with its back to that light. A room this small still has a clear orientation built into it.

One limitation should be stated plainly. The Takagi Family Residence Tea House stands behind the main house, and nothing of it can be seen from Honmachi Street. Photographs are published on the Agency for Cultural Affairs database and on Cultural Heritage Online, and looking at those before walking the street is the practical way to understand what lies behind the frontages.

Visiting the Takagi Family Residence Tea House

This building is part of a privately owned residence and is closed to visitors, inside and out. There are no opening days, no hours and no admission fee. Nothing in Inuyama City's published material indicates regular tea gatherings or special openings here.

Photography does not arise as a practical question, since there is no public vantage point from which the building is visible. Entering the grounds is not permitted.

For anyone visiting the area, Meitetsu Inuyama Station is the starting point. A walk of about 10 minutes north along Honmachi Street reaches the point where the Takagi main house faces the street. Rapid limited express and limited express trains from Meitetsu Nagoya Station take about 25 minutes.

Visitors who want to walk through the interior of an Inuyama townhouse can do so at the former Isobe Family Residence at number 72 on the same street, kept open without charge by Inuyama City. It does not substitute for the Takagi Family Residence Tea House, but it gives a sense of the scale of the merchant households that put small tea rooms in their back gardens.