Tokugawa Garden Tsurube Well

A working well from the service side of a lord's residence

The Tokugawa Garden Tsurube Well (徳川園釣瓶井戸) is a stone draw well of about 1900 in Tokugawacho, Higashi-ku, Nagoya City, Aichi Prefecture, and it was listed as a Registered Tangible Cultural Property in 2014.

A tsurube is a bucket on a rope that runs over a pulley, dropped into the shaft and hauled up hand over hand. The well sits east of the Side Nagaya, on the part of the estate that handled the practical business of the household rather than its display. According to the Agency for Cultural Affairs, a stable and a carriage shed once stood alongside it. Both are gone. The well is what remains of that corner.

The estate here began in 1695, when Tokugawa Mitsutomo, second lord of the Owari domain, built a retirement villa on the site. The Owari Tokugawa family took the ground back in 1889 and rebuilt, and the Tokugawa Garden Tsurube Well belongs to that campaign, along with the gate and wall registered on the same day. Nagoya City received the property in 1931; the garden opened the following year and lost most of its buildings to air raids in 1945.

Why it carries a registration

The Tokugawa Garden Tsurube Well was entered on the national register on 7 October 2014 under registration number 23-0406, in the category of structures contributing to the historic landscape of the country. It is counted as one unit, and the record describes it as stone-built, occupying 1.6 square meters, and roofed.

Registration is not the same instrument as designation as an Important Cultural Property. It was created in 1996 for buildings and structures, chiefly from the Meiji period onward, whose value lies in how they hold the character of a place. A well is exactly the sort of thing the older system tended to pass over, and the reasoning behind the listing is worth reading closely: the garden's own account puts the Tokugawa Garden Tsurube Well alongside the wall as a piece that settles the historic setting of the buildings around it.

It is also unusually complete. Many wells that survive on old estates keep only the stone curb, with the superstructure long since removed. Here the curb, the posts, the roof, the pulley and the bucket are all present.

The detail that a well did not need

The curb of the Tokugawa Garden Tsurube Well is granite, cut into blocks and assembled as a square frame measuring 1.95 meters on a side. Squared stone laid this way is a plain solution, and up to this point the well is ordinary.

What happens above it is not. A post stands beside the curb carrying an arm, and both are finished with the adze rather than the plane, so the surface keeps a faceted, rippling texture that catches raking light. Over the head of the well is a small gabled roof clad in cedar bark, its ridge line finished with barge boards. The whole assembly stands 2.4 meters high.

Hanging from the arm is the piece that gives the well away. The pulley is iron, and its disc is cut through with an openwork pattern of cherry blossom. Nobody drawing water needs a decorated pulley. Somebody on this estate decided the well should have one anyway, and it is the clearest sign that the service yard was held to the same standard as the front gate.

Look at the four elements together, curb, adzed post, cedar-bark roof and pierced pulley, and the Tokugawa Garden Tsurube Well reads less as plumbing than as a small piece of designed carpentry that happened to lift water.

Visiting

The Tokugawa Garden Tsurube Well stands within Tokugawaen, the garden laid out on the old residence site, east of the Side Nagaya, and visitors who enter the garden can see it. 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. An annual pass costs 1,200 yen.

Personal photography needs no permission, but the garden asks visitors not to set up tripods at busy times. Portrait sessions, including wedding and coming-of-age photographs, need an application in advance whether or not they are commercial, and so do shoots for advertising, television or film.

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 a three-minute walk, and the Meguru sightseeing bus stops at the garden. Free volunteer guides are available on Fridays, Saturdays, Sundays and public holidays from a desk just inside the entrance, and they will point out where the stable once stood.