Tokugawa Art Museum Yamanochaya

What the Tokugawa Art Museum Yamanochaya Is

The Tokugawa Art Museum Yamanochaya (徳川美術館山の茶屋) is a tea building of 1883 standing in the grounds of the Tokugawa Art Museum in Tokugawacho, Higashi-ku, Nagoya City, entered on the national register as a Registered Tangible Cultural Property (structure) in 2014. Museum notices also write the name 山ノ茶屋.

It is a single-story timber building with a roof laid partly in ceramic tile and partly in sheet copper, covering 96 square meters. Attached to it is a tomomachi, a shelter where the attendants who accompanied a guest could wait. The building was moved to a new position in 1894 and refurbished in 1948 and again in 1959.

The plan is two wings meeting at a right angle. The east-west wing holds the upper room and the middle room; the north-south wing holds the lower room and the Chashitsu tea room. Of the registered buildings in the museum grounds, the Tokugawa Art Museum Yamanochaya carries the earliest construction date, and it offers a way into how buildings in a daimyo garden were arranged.

Why the Tokugawa Art Museum Yamanochaya Was Registered

The criterion applied is that the building is a model of its type in form and design. Its registration number is 23-0409, dated 7 October 2014, and on the same day two more buildings in the grounds were registered: Shinkuan and Yohoken, and the Yohoken Arbor.

What carries the case is the surviving arrangement of rooms by floor level. Upper, middle, and lower rooms, jodan, chudan, and gedan, translate the rank of the person seated into the height of the floor beneath them, a convention of warrior-class houses in the Edo period. The Tokugawa Art Museum Yamanochaya keeps that arrangement in a building of the Meiji era.

The attendants' shelter completes the picture. While the principal guest was received in the upper or middle room, the retinue waited outside in the tomomachi. One modest building thus gave separate places to the host, the honoured guest, and the people who came with him.

The detailing follows Sukiya-zukuri taste. Posts in the east-west wing are largely menkawa-bashira, squared logs with a strip of bark left at each corner. The north-south wing uses cedar posts cut so that straight grain runs on all four faces. There are sloping ceilings that follow the roof, sand-finished plaster, a Shitaji-mado window that exposes the lath armature behind the wall, and room corners cut away at an angle. Formal hierarchy and informal materials share the same small building.

What to Look For at the Tokugawa Art Museum Yamanochaya

Start with the posts. In the east-west wing of the Tokugawa Art Museum Yamanochaya they are menkawa-bashira: the log has been squared, but a sliver of the original bark edge survives on each corner, so the arris is faintly round and a trace of outer wood colour remains. The cedar posts of the north-south wing were sawn the opposite way, to bring true straight grain onto all four faces. One reads as rustic, the other as exact.

The ceilings vary too. A kakekomi ceiling leaves part of the room open to the underside of the roof, so the space runs away at a slope rather than stopping flat. In a tea room, where ceilings are kept low, that slope takes the pressure off.

Walls are finished with sand mixed into the plaster. At a Shitaji-mado, the bamboo lath that normally hides inside the wall is simply left uncovered, and the opening becomes a window: light arrives through the lattice rather than through glass.

Look for the corners that have been cut on the diagonal. Removing a right angle lets the eye travel around the wall instead of stopping, and the room reads as larger than it measures. Outside, the change from tile to copper on the roof marks where one wing ends and the other begins.

Visiting the Tokugawa Art Museum Yamanochaya

The Tokugawa Art Museum Yamanochaya is normally closed. It is not part of the gallery route, and a museum ticket does not admit you.

There are ways in. The museum states that people taking part in an event that uses the tea rooms may see and use them. The main occasion is the Tokugawa Tea Gathering, held annually between October and November. The tea rooms are also available for hire through the museum's facility booking procedure. Dates and application methods change from year to year, so check the museum's official site before building a trip around it.

The museum itself opens 10:00 a.m. to 5:00 p.m., last admission 4:30 p.m., closed Mondays; when a Monday is a public holiday or substitute holiday the closure moves to the next weekday. Admission covers the museum and the Nagoya City Hosa Library: 2,000 yen for adults, 1,200 yen for high school and university students, free for elementary and junior high school students. Photography with a smartphone or compact camera is permitted in the galleries, while photography inside the tea rooms follows whatever the individual event allows.

The nearest station is Ozone on the JR Chuo Line, about 10 minutes on foot from the south exit. From Ozone on the Meijo subway line, allow about 15 minutes from exit E5. City and Meitetsu buses stop at Tokugawaen Shindeki, about 3 minutes away.