Roji

What a roji is

A roji is the garden attached to a Chashitsu. It is laid out as the route a guest takes from the waiting place to the entrance of the tea room, with a gate, stepping stones, a water basin and a bench placed in sequence along it.

In cultural property records it is usually the structures rather than the ground that are listed. The tea-garden gate and wall at the Fujino Residence in Osaka Prefecture, from the middle Meiji period, are recorded as a timber gate 1.6 metres wide with a tiled roof and a timber wall eight metres long, each counted with its dimensions.

The inner wicket gate at the Kamiya Residence in Aichi Prefecture, built in the early Showa period, is described as a single-bay bracket gate 1.7 metres wide, Kirizuma-zukuri with a copper roof and a sliding wicket, its adzed posts carrying a log purlin on brackets, and the entry credits it with shaping the character of the garden.

Where the garden itself is protected, it is usually designated as a Place of Scenic Beauty. One property can therefore carry a building on the register and a garden under a separate designation.

What stands in the garden

The former Murayama Residence in Hyogo Prefecture, built in 1911, is recorded as an Important Cultural Property whose Insū covers two tea rooms of three and four and a half mats, an entrance with a waiting room, a bench, a reception room, a waiting shelter, a garden privy and a connecting corridor. Read as a list, it amounts to an inventory of what a tea garden contains.

All of these are small buildings, and their roofs vary. The same entry lists thatch, pantiles and cypress bark together, because a single property may use several coverings across its scattered structures.

For a visitor, the point worth holding in mind is that the route itself has been designed. Passing the gate, waiting on the bench and following the stones to the entrance is a sequence built into the arrangement of buildings and ground alike.