Hassoan (formerly Shanain Bosen)

An Early Edo Tea House That Travelled to Hokkaido

Hassoan (八窓庵, also written Hassō-an, and formally recorded as Hassoan, formerly Shanain Bōsen / 旧舎那院忘筌) is an early Edo period tea house standing in Nakajima Park in Chūō Ward, Sapporo, Hokkaido, designated on 18 September 1936 and now protected as an Important Cultural Property. It is the only nationally designated tea house on the island.

The building did not begin here. It was put up in Ōmi Province, within the grounds of Kobori Enshū's Komuro Castle in what is now Nagahama, Shiga Prefecture. Enshū, the daimyo and tea master who shaped much of seventeenth-century taste in architecture and garden design, is held to have made it, and Hassoan is counted among the three tea rooms traditionally associated with him. The exact year of construction is unknown; the Agency for Cultural Affairs records the period simply as 1615 to 1660.

Its journey north took three centuries. The tea house moved first to Nagahama Hachimangū, then to Enkyōji in the village of Kawasaki, and afterwards to the temple Shanain in Nagahama town, which is the source of the name it carries in the official register. In 1919 a Sapporo businessman named Kin'ya Mochida acquired it, had it dismantled and shipped the timbers to Hokkaido. He reassembled it in 1925 on his own property in what is now Chūō Ward, adding a four-and-a-half mat room called Sanbun'an and a preparation room; neither addition falls within the designation.

The Designation and What Makes the Room Unusual

Hassoan was listed under the old National Treasure Preservation Law on 18 September 1936. When the Law for the Protection of Cultural Properties took effect in 1950 it became an Important Cultural Property, and the City of Sapporo records that transition as 29 August 1950. The Agency for Cultural Affairs database carries 1936 as the designation date, so both years appear in reliable sources depending on which statute is being cited.

The plan is nijō daime: two full tatami plus a shortened mat at the host's place, a single storey under a gabled roof now sheeted in copper. That is a small room even by the standards of grass-hut tea architecture. Its name comes from the count of openings. Three renji lattice windows, four shitaji windows where the bamboo lath of the wall is left exposed, and one skylight that props open from below make eight in total. Tea rooms conventionally hold their light tightly, and eight windows in a room this size breaks that convention deliberately.

The materials repay close attention. Walls are earthen, finished with jurakudo, a clay quarried near Kyoto. The ceiling above the guest seats is woven from cattail leaves in the manner of a mat. The central pillar in front of the hearth is a red pine log with the bark left on, and tradition holds that Enshū dressed it himself with an adze. A plaque reading Bōsen hangs at the front of the room, thought to be in Enshū's own hand. The word means something close to forgetting the whisk in one's hand, taken as a sign of the maker's satisfaction with what he had built.

Loss, Rebuilding and How to See It Now

In March 2005 the prefabricated shelter erected each winter to carry the snow load collapsed onto the building beneath it. Hassoan and the water room were destroyed outright and Sanbun'an was half wrecked. Structural timber and joinery alike broke or split across the whole building.

The designation was not revoked. Instead the repair set out to reuse as much original material as could be reinforced. Earthen walls were rebuilt with the old lath where possible, and the wall clay itself was kneaded again from stock that had been kept, with new material added only to make up the shortfall. The hardest case was the central pillar, which had snapped in two places into three pieces. Conservators inserted a hinoki cypress core, consolidated the timber by vacuum impregnation with an acrylic emulsion, and put the pillar back. Work finished in October 2008. During the dismantling survey two ridge tablets came to light in the roof space, dated to 1902 and 1925, which confirmed the sequence by which Mochida had brought the timbers north and reassembled them.

Long before that, in September 1971, the tea house had been given to the City of Sapporo by the family of Eiichi Nagasawa, who had acquired it with the house in 1950. Rather than take it apart again, the movers drove it across the city intact by truck at night. A roji, the garden path that leads to a tea room, was laid out around it in 1987.

The interior is not open to the public. What visitors see is the exterior, from the Japanese garden inside Nakajima Park, and the setting is much of the point: the garden opened in 1963 and holds twelve stone lanterns modelled on well-known examples from around Japan. The garden closes for the winter and reopens in the warm months, typically from late April to early November, generally between 9:00 and 17:00, with no admission charge. Since those dates shift with the snow each year, checking with the park office before a spring or late autumn visit is worthwhile.

Nakajima Park Station on the Namboku subway line sits about five minutes' walk away. Photography of the exterior is unrestricted in normal circumstances. Hōheikan, the 1880 Kaitakushi hotel that is also an Important Cultural Property, stands in the same park, which makes a single stop cover two nationally designated buildings roughly two hundred and fifty years apart in date.