Tamesaburo Memorial Museum Tameshun-Tei

Ishuntei: A 1934 Sukiya Villa on a Nagoya Hillside

On a slope in the Kakuozan district of eastern Nagoya, a low wooden house leans out over a garden, part of its southwest side carried on posts above the falling ground. This is Ishuntei, the main residence built in 1934 (Showa 9) by Furukawa Tamesaburo, a Nagoya businessman who made his fortune in cinemas and film distribution and lived to the age of 103. He spent his later years here among the trees he loved. After his death in 1993, the family foundation opened the house to the public in 1995 as the Tamesaburo Memorial Hall, an annex of the nearby Furukawa Art Museum.

Tamesaburo (1890–1993) built the Herald Group, a cluster of roughly thirty companies centered on movie theaters and film distribution. He was also a lifelong collector, and the museum that carries his memory holds some 2,800 works, including modern Japanese paintings, ceramics, and a fifteenth-century illuminated manuscript. The house, though, was something more personal. He asked that it be kept as a place where people could rest, and that wish still shapes how it is used.

A House Built to Sit on a Slope

The building reads as a single wooden story, with a small basement level tucked into the slope and a tiled roof above. Its footprint covers about 325 square meters. Because the land drops away to the southwest, the builders used kakezukuri, a method of carrying part of a structure on a framework of posts so that it projects over the lower ground. The same technique gives Kyoto's Kiyomizudera its famous stage, but here it works at the quiet scale of a private home.

Inside, two tatami reception rooms and a tea room step back from one another in a staggered line that the Japanese call ganko, after the formation of geese in flight. The family's living rooms sit on the north side, across a small courtyard. The design throughout is sukiya, the understated manner that grew out of the tea house: slender posts, timber left close to its natural character, plastered walls in muted earth tones, and a studied avoidance of heavy ornament. Specialists place it in the category of kindai wafu, a modern building in a thoroughly Japanese idiom, finished to the materials and craft standards of the early twentieth century.

Why Ishuntei Was Registered

In November 2018, Ishuntei and five other structures on the grounds were entered in the national Register of Tangible Cultural Properties. This distinction is worth pausing over, because the register is not the same as the better-known ranks of National Treasure or Important Cultural Property. Those are designated properties, selected for outstanding national value and held to strict controls. The register, created in 1996, is a lighter framework aimed largely at buildings of the past century or so, encouraging owners to keep them in active use while preserving their character. A registered property carries real recognition without the heavier restrictions that designation brings.

The six listed structures are the main gate, the east gate, Ishuntei itself, a garden tea house called Chisokuan, a small waiting shelter, and the privy. Ishuntei was registered under the criterion that a building serve as "a model of design," a nod to how cleanly its sukiya scheme is resolved. The city of Nagoya had already recognized the property in 2013 as a building important to the local townscape.

What to Look For on a Visit

The garden was laid out under the supervision of the landscape designer Inoue Takayuki, around the principle of teioku ichinyo, the idea that house and garden should form a single whole rather than two separate things. Five large shii trees, a kind of evergreen chinquapin, anchor the planting. Tamesaburo, who held that great trees are dwelling places for kami, refused to cut them, and the house was arranged around their presence. From the tea room and the projecting veranda, the garden fills the view in every season.

Much of the pleasure of a visit now lies in the Sukiya de Cafe set within the house. Visitors can take matcha, the green tea that Tamesaburo credited for his long life, with seasonal Japanese sweets or coffee, while looking out at the garden. The tea bowls are works by potters of the nearby Seto and Mino kilns. Tea is charged separately from admission.

Because Ishuntei is a wooden building without the tight climate control of a modern gallery, the memorial hall tends to show ceramics and crafts rather than fragile paintings, and curators pick pieces to suit the character of each room. Several times a year the rooms host special displays and tea gatherings, so what you find changes with the calendar.

Around Kakuozan

The memorial hall stands a short walk from Ikeshita Station on the Higashiyama subway line, and only a minute or two from the main Furukawa Art Museum building, so the two are easily seen together. The surrounding Kakuozan neighborhood rewards an unhurried afternoon. The approach to Nittaiji, a temple founded in 1904 that enshrines relics of the Buddha received from Siam, today's Thailand, and that belongs to no single Buddhist school, runs as a long shopping street of about ninety shops, where old dango stalls share the pavement with patisseries, tea specialists, and small galleries. A fair on the 21st of each month and a seasonal festival three times a year draw crowds. To the south, the Suidomichi greenway follows a former waterworks route for roughly two kilometers and turns into a line of cherry blossom in spring.