Tokugawa Garden Wall

84 meters along the western edge of the estate

The Tokugawa Garden Wall (徳川園塀) is a wooden boundary wall of about 1900 in Tokugawacho, Higashi-ku, Nagoya City, Aichi Prefecture, and it was listed as a Registered Tangible Cultural Property in 2014.

It marks the western edge of what was the Ōzone residence, the Nagoya seat of the Owari Tokugawa family. The total run is 84 meters. That figure covers a wall that is not one thing but several: it meets the black front gate on both sides, carries a small service gate on the right-hand side as you face the gate, continues north to the west entrance of the Sozanso building, and then climbs the slope in the western part of the grounds in stepped sections.

The estate goes back to 1695, when Tokugawa Mitsutomo, second lord of Owari, built a retirement villa here. The Owari Tokugawa recovered the site in 1889, and the Tokugawa Garden Wall belongs to the rebuilding that followed. Nagoya City was given the property in 1931 and opened the garden the next year. Air raids in 1945 took most of the buildings. The wall, the gate it flanks and the Side Nagaya behind it are what held.

Why a wall was worth registering

The Tokugawa Garden Wall went on the national register on 7 October 2014, registration number 23-0405, in the category of structures contributing to the historic landscape of the country. The record lists it as one structure, wooden, tile-roofed, 84 meters in total length, with a wicket door, dated to around 1900 with repairs in 2004.

The reasoning is about the street rather than the building. A boundary wall is the part of an estate that the public actually meets, and this one still runs along the outside of the garden in the form it was given. The Agency for Cultural Affairs describes it as lending character to the streetscape; the garden's own account says it shows its original appearance and settles the historic setting of the buildings around it. Neither claim rests on rarity of construction. Both rest on the fact that the wall is still where it was, doing what it did.

Registration and designation are separate systems. Designation as an Important Cultural Property applies a heavy protective regime to a small number of buildings; registration, introduced in 1996, is lighter and takes in things like walls and wells that shape a place without being monuments.

The specification changes as you walk

Follow the Tokugawa Garden Wall from the gate and the finish changes underfoot. The stretch beside the black gate, running north to the west entrance of Sozanso, is roofed in Sangawara-buki, the light single-lap pantiles that replaced heavy temple tiling on ordinary buildings, and its face combines clapboard siding held by notched battens with panels of white lime plaster. This is the formal treatment, the one meant to be read from the street.

On the sloping ground in the west of the grounds the wall does something else. It steps up the incline in bays roughly three ken wide, each section dropping to meet the next, so the roofline becomes a staircase rather than a line. The outer face here is vertical boarding with applied battens. The inner face is different again: cedar bark, held down by split bamboo.

That inner face is the detail worth going out of your way for. Cedar bark under split bamboo is a technique associated with tea-garden fences, not with the perimeter of a lord's house, and choosing it for the side that only the household would see says something about how the two faces of the Tokugawa Garden Wall were meant to work. The street got plaster and clapboard. The garden got bark and bamboo.

The wall was repaired in 2004, when the garden was rebuilt as a Japanese garden, so what stands is a maintained fabric rather than untouched material. The lines and the specifications are the original ones.

Visiting

Part of the Tokugawa Garden Wall can be seen without paying anything. It runs along the outside of Tokugawaen on the western side, so the street elevation is open to anyone walking past. The stepped sections on the slope and the inner faces are inside the garden.

The garden is open from 9:30 a.m. to 5:30 p.m., last entry 5:00 p.m., and 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.

Photographing the wall for personal use needs no permission, though tripods should be avoided when the garden is busy. Portrait shoots and commercial work require an application in advance.

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; 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 in front of the garden. Free volunteer guides work on Fridays, Saturdays, Sundays and public holidays.