Tokugawa Garden Black Gate

The front gate of the Owari Tokugawa family's Nagoya residence

The Tokugawa Garden Black Gate (徳川園黒門, also read Kuromon) is a wooden gate of 1899 standing in Tokugawacho, Higashi-ku, Nagoya City, Aichi Prefecture, and it was listed as a Registered Tangible Cultural Property in 2014.

It was put up as the formal entrance to the Ōzone residence, the Nagoya seat of the Owari Tokugawa family, the senior branch of the three Tokugawa houses. The site itself is older. In 1695 Tokugawa Mitsutomo, the second lord of the Owari domain, moved into a retirement villa here that covered roughly 44 hectares. After his death the land passed through three of the domain's chief retainer families, the Naruse, the Ishiko and the Watanabe, and returned to the Owari Tokugawa in 1889. The gate belongs to the rebuilding that followed.

In 1931 Tokugawa Yoshichika, the nineteenth head of the house, gave the residence and its grounds to Nagoya City, and the garden opened to the public the next year. Air raids in 1945 destroyed most of what stood inside. The Tokugawa Garden Black Gate came through, and it is one of the few pieces of the old residence still standing where it was built.

Why it carries a registration

The Tokugawa Garden Black Gate was entered on the national register on 7 October 2014 under registration number 23-0403, in the category of structures contributing to the historic landscape of the country. Registration is a lighter form of protection than designation as an Important Cultural Property, and it is aimed at buildings from the Meiji period onward that shape the character of a place.

Nagoya City makes the case in terms of the group rather than the single building. The gate, the Side Nagaya beside it and the long wall that runs from it were all listed on the same day, and together they hold the outline of a samurai estate frontage that the 1945 raids otherwise erased from this part of the city. The city had already certified the gate in its own register of local architectural assets in 2011, as number 18.

The building type is a Yakuimon: two main pillars with a pair of supporting pillars set behind them, carrying a gabled roof whose ridge sits forward, over the main pillars rather than at the centre. Three bays wide, with a frontage of 3.6 meters and a wicket door for use when the main leaves are shut, it is large for its type.

What repays a close look

Stand in front of the Tokugawa Garden Black Gate and the first thing that registers is the thickness of the timber. The framing members are keyaki, Japanese zelkova, cut heavy; Nagoya City describes the gate as built throughout in that wood. Nothing is carved. There are no moldings on the beam ends, no incised patterns on the brackets. A temple's outer gate of similar size would be busy with ornament, and the restraint here is the point.

The decoration that does exist is all on the roof, in tile. The roof is gabled and laid in Hongawarabuki, the heavy pairing of broad pan tiles and semi-cylindrical cover tiles, and the eaves are doubled, with rafters spaced widely apart. Shishiguchi tiles finish the ends of the main ridge. Where the gable comes to a point, an inome gegyo hangs, a pendant board pierced with the heart-shaped opening that gives the form its name.

Look along the descending ridges and at the round tiles at the corners and eaves, and the triple-hollyhock crest of the Tokugawa appears again and again. At the end of one ridge sits a turtle, modelled in clay as a tomebuta, the tile that caps the ridge end and keeps rain out.

The gable end is worth a minute on its own. A heavy transverse beam carries a bottle-shaped strut, a Taiheizuka, on each side; above them runs a Kōryō, a beam with a gently curved lower edge; and a further strut above that takes the ridge beam. It is a structural sequence that carpenters used in temple work, applied here to the gate of a lord's town house.

Visiting

The Tokugawa Garden Black Gate stands at the western entrance to Tokugawaen, the garden that now occupies the residence site, and the ticket barrier is set at the gate. The garden is open from 9:30 a.m. to 5:30 p.m., with last entry at 5:00 p.m., and closes on Mondays; when a Monday falls on a public holiday the closure moves to the next non-holiday day. It also closes from 29 December to 1 January. Admission is 300 yen for adults, 100 yen for Nagoya residents aged 65 and over, and free for junior high school students and younger.

Photography for personal use needs no permission, though the garden asks that tripods be left alone when it is busy. Shoots centred on people, including wedding, coming-of-age and shichi-go-san portraits, require an application in advance whether or not money changes hands, as do commercial shoots for advertising, television or film.

From JR Ōzone Station it is about 10 minutes on foot from the south exit; from Ōzone Station on the Meijo subway line, about 15 minutes from exit 3; and from Morishita Station on the Meitetsu Seto line, about 10 minutes. The Kikan bus stop Tokugawaen Shindeki is three minutes away, and the Meguru sightseeing loop bus sets down at the garden itself. Volunteer garden guides work from a reception point just inside the ticket barrier at the gate on Fridays, Saturdays, Sundays and public holidays, free of charge.