Ibaraki University Izura Institute of Art and Culture Okakura Tenshin Former Residence (Study)

The house Okakura Tenshin drew for himself

Ibaraki University Izura Institute of Art and Culture Okakura Tenshin Former Residence (Study) is a single-storey timber house on the Izura shore at Kitaibaraki, Ibaraki Prefecture, completed in 1905 (Meiji 38) and listed as a Registered Tangible Cultural Property on July 1, 2003.

It faces almost due east, straight at the Pacific. Okakura Tenshin (岡倉天心, personal name Kakuzo) had resigned as head of the Tokyo Fine Arts School in 1898 and founded the Japan Art Institute; he first came to this stretch of coast in May 1903, guided by the painter Hida Shuzan, and liked it enough to build here two years later. The design was his own. The carpentry was in the hands of Ogura Genzo, a master builder from the local district.

The roof sits at a shallow pitch. Slate covers it today, but the original covering was Kokerabuki shingle, and the plan underneath is domestic rather than institutional: a guest room and a living room at the core, the entrance set on the north side, the kitchen quarters to the northwest. An inner room once occupied the southwest corner. The registered floor area is 159 square meters.

In 1906 Tenshin moved the Japan Art Institute itself to Izura, and the painters Yokoyama Taikan, Hishida Shunso, Shimomura Kanzan and Kimura Buzan came with their families to work beside him.

What the register recognizes

Ibaraki University Izura Institute of Art and Culture Okakura Tenshin Former Residence was listed as registration number 08-0079 under the criterion for work that serves as a model of design. The Registered Tangible Cultural Property scheme applies to buildings that stay in use, and this one has never been turned into a museum piece.

Two things make it unusual. The first is authorship: very few surviving houses in Japan were drawn by the person who lived in them, and fewer still by a figure who spent his working life arguing for the value of Japanese art abroad. The second is the material. Timber was taken from Kanpuro, a restaurant that had stood on this ground before, so the house was assembled from second-hand components on the day it was finished. That thrift is exactly what gives the interior its restrained Sukiya-zukuri character.

The house passed to the family after Tenshin died, and in 1955 Yokoyama Taikan, then chairman of the association that honored him, offered the property to Ibaraki University, which set up the Izura Institute to look after it.

What stands now is smaller than what Tenshin knew. After his death in 1913 the family altered the house, and it is reduced to roughly half its former extent. The wider setting was recognized separately in 2014, when the grounds, the garden Tenshin laid out and the two coves below were listed as a Registered Monument under the name Okakura Tenshin Former Residence, Garden and the Oizura and Koizura Coves.

The sea has taken its toll. In 2011 the tsunami that followed the Great East Japan Earthquake pushed water under the floor of the house and left damage behind, while the Rokkakudo pavilion further down the rock shelf was carried away entirely.

What to look at on the ground

Walk down the mossy path from the gate and the ground opens out. The house sits on the right, the ocean on the left, and the relationship between the two is the whole point of the building. Tenshin put the principal rooms where the horizon does the work.

The lawn in front is worth a second look. Tenshin brought grass seed back from Boston, where he worked at the Museum of Fine Arts through the winters, and sowed it here. A lawn in front of a Japanese timber house was an odd thing in Meiji Japan, and it says something about a man who spent half of each year on the other side of the world. The Book of Tea was written in the traffic between these two places.

Close to the house stands a stone carved with the phrase "Asia is one" in the hand of Yokoyama Taikan.

Look at the eaves line and the shallow roof pitch from the seaward side. The slate is a later covering, so the profile you see is not quite the one built in 1905, and the difference is easy to read once you know the original was shingle.

Visiting

Ibaraki University Izura Institute of Art and Culture Okakura Tenshin Former Residence stands inside the grounds of the institute, which are open to the public for an admission charge of 400 yen. Groups of 20 or more and visitors aged 70 and over pay 350 yen, and junior high school students and younger are admitted free. Opening hours are 9:30 a.m. to 4:30 p.m., with last entry at 4:00 p.m. The institute closes on Mondays as a rule, or the following day when the Monday is a public holiday, and it publishes an opening calendar that is worth checking before a long journey, since closures for weather and for building work do happen.

Getting there: the nearest station is Otsuko on the JR Joban Line, about 10 minutes away by taxi. A municipal circular bus serves the Izura route, but it runs on limited days and times.

Photography: visitors take pictures on the grounds, but Ibaraki University asks that anyone wanting to film its buildings, or to publish photographs and video of them, apply in advance. The university cites both safety and the condition of the buildings as the reason. If you are shooting for anything other than a personal album, contact the institute first.

Whether the interior can be entered is not stated on the official pages, so ask at the reception desk in the gatehouse on arrival. The Rokkakudo below is illuminated from sunset until 9:00 p.m.