Tokugawa Garden Side Nagaya

The building that watched the gate

The Tokugawa Garden Side Nagaya (徳川園脇長屋) is a single-storey wooden range of about 1900 in Tokugawacho, Higashi-ku, Nagoya City, Aichi Prefecture, and it was listed as a Registered Tangible Cultural Property in 2014.

A nagaya is a long building divided into rooms along its length. This one stands south of the black front gate of the old Ōzone residence, the Nagoya seat of the Owari Tokugawa family, and connects to it through the boundary wall. It runs north to south, 19.6 meters along the ridge and 6.6 meters across, with a building area of 127 square meters. The Agency for Cultural Affairs rounds the length to about 20 meters.

The site was a retirement villa built in 1695 for Tokugawa Mitsutomo, second lord of the Owari domain. The family recovered the ground in 1889 and rebuilt, and the Tokugawa Garden Side Nagaya dates from that work. Nagoya City received the estate in 1931 and opened the garden in 1932. Air raids in 1945 destroyed most of what stood here; this building, the gate and the wall did not burn. The range was altered in 1932 and again in 2004.

Why it carries a registration

The Tokugawa Garden Side Nagaya was entered on the national register on 7 October 2014, registration number 23-0404, in the category of structures contributing to the historic landscape of the country. It is counted as one building, wooden, single-storey and tile-roofed.

Registration is a lighter instrument than designation as an Important Cultural Property, created in 1996 and aimed largely at buildings from the Meiji period onward. Nagoya City's reasoning treats this range as part of a set: with the gate and the wall it holds the frontage of a samurai estate, a form that the 1945 raids removed from almost everywhere else in the district. The city had already certified it in 2011 as number 19 in its own register of local architectural assets, one place after the gate.

There is a further reason to look at it closely. The Agency for Cultural Affairs reads the projecting latticed window at the northwest corner, the corner nearest the gate, as evidence that the building worked as a gatehouse. A range like this is easy to describe as an outbuilding. The window says it was a post, with someone in it watching who came through.

What to look at

The roof of the Tokugawa Garden Side Nagaya is Irimoya-zukuri, hipped-and-gabled, laid in Sangawara-buki pantiles. That is a step up in formality from what an outbuilding usually gets, and it is the first thing that separates this range from a plain service block.

Go to the gable end. The wall under the gable is filled with a lattice backed by boards, a treatment called kitsure-goshi, sometimes kitsune-goshi, the fox lattice. Then look along the eaves at the round end tiles. The crest on them is a six-leaf hollyhock, not the three-leaf version that runs along the gate a few meters away. Two Tokugawa crests, two forms, on structures put up in the same campaign.

The west face is the one that matters, because it was built to line up with the wall that continues from it. The lower part is clapboard held by notched battens; above that runs white lime plaster. Set into it, left and right, are musha-mado, windows of heavy vertical bars used on turrets and on the quarters of retainers. At the northwest corner there is another, set lower than the rest, and this is the one the Agency for Cultural Affairs describes as projecting out from the wall face.

Stand back far enough to take in the gate and the Tokugawa Garden Side Nagaya together and the logic of the frontage comes clear. The gate carries the formality, the range carries the function, and the wall stitches the two into one continuous elevation along the street.

Visiting

The Tokugawa Garden Side Nagaya is in daily use as the management office of Tokugawaen, the garden on the residence site, so what visitors see is the outside. The building sits immediately beside the entrance; anyone entering the garden passes it. For anything concerning the interior, ask at the office itself.

Opening hours are 9:30 a.m. to 5:30 p.m., with last entry at 5:00 p.m. The garden closes on Mondays, moving the closure to the next non-holiday day when a Monday is a public holiday, and 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.

Personal photography needs no permission; tripods should be avoided at busy times. Portrait sessions and commercial shoots require an application in advance.

From JR Ōzone Station the walk is about 10 minutes from the south exit; from Ōzone Station on the Meijo subway line about 15 minutes from exit 3; 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 bus stops at the garden. Free volunteer guides are on duty Fridays, Saturdays, Sundays and public holidays.