Former Hassam House (formerly Located in Kitano Cho, Ikuta

The Former Hassam Residence

A brick chimney lies on its side on the lawn in front of the Former Hassam Residence. It came down from the roof during the Great Hanshin-Awaji Earthquake of January 1995, and the city left it where it fell rather than rebuilding it out of sight. The house behind it has stood since 1902, when a Kobe trader named J.K. Hassam, British by nationality and of Indian descent, built it as his family home.

The building is a two-story wooden house with a hipped roof of Japanese pantile, covering a footprint of about 174 square meters. Kobe residents call houses like this ijinkan, the Western-style homes built by foreign merchants who settled in the port after it opened to overseas trade in 1868. This one no longer stands on its original ground. Since 1963 it has occupied a corner of Sorakuen, a Japanese garden in central Kobe, where its pale clapboard walls and deep verandas sit a short walk from a pond-stroll garden and a five-hundred-year-old camphor tree.

From a Kitano hillside to a garden in Sorakuen

Hassam built the house on a rise in Kitano-chō, the district above the old foreign settlement where merchants of many nationalities kept their homes. Pearl and gem dealers of Indian origin were among the residents there in the Meiji period, and Hassam belonged to that mercantile world, though little else about him survives in the record.

The design is recorded as the work of Alexander Nelson Hansell, a British architect who arrived in Japan in 1888 to teach at a theological school before turning to building. Hansell designed a long list of Kobe residences, among them the Choueke House and the green-painted Moegi no Yakata. He favored the colonial manner the Hassam Residence shows so clearly: a broad veranda facing south, generous window openings, and a plan built for a warm, humid climate.

Ownership passed through several hands. By the mid-twentieth century the property belonged to the Kobe Muslim Mosque, which donated it to the City of Kobe in 1961. Two years later, in 1963, the city dismantled the house and rebuilt it inside Sorakuen, where it has remained. The garden had lost almost all of its original buildings to the air raids of June 1945, and the transplanted residence helped restore a sense of the place as it had been.

Why it was designated

The residence was named an Important Cultural Property on 7 June 1961, shortly before its move. The Agency for Cultural Affairs describes it plainly as one of the finer foreign houses of Kobe, and its value rests on that point: it is an unusually complete and well-preserved example of the colonial-style merchant home that defined the city's foreign quarters around the turn of the twentieth century.

Many ijinkan have been altered, commercialized, or rebuilt for tourism. The Hassam Residence kept its proportions and detailing, and its interior was preserved with care after the move, which is part of why it reads as a real house of its period rather than a stage set.

What to look for

The south face is the architectural argument. The ground floor runs as an arcade of repeated arches; the floor above answers with a colonnade of slender columns. Look up at the second-floor veranda and you will find the column capitals carved with acanthus leaves, a classical touch on a timber building far from the Mediterranean.

The walls are clapboard, laid horizontally and finished in oil paint, the standard treatment for these houses. Bay windows push out from the façade. Louvered shutters frame the openings, and shallow pediments cap them. None of this is monumental. The pleasure of the building is in how readily the parts add up to a comfortable house, the kind a merchant family actually lived in.

Inside, the ground floor held the rooms for receiving guests, a parlor, a sitting room, and a dining room, while the bedrooms and private quarters sat upstairs. When the house is open, period photographs and documents are displayed in the rooms, and volunteer guides answer questions. In the front garden, beside the fallen chimney, stands a gas lamp dating to around 1874. It once lit a street in the former foreign settlement and counts among the oldest surviving gas lamps in Japan.

One footnote for film fans: the house played the home of a Scottish couple in the 2016 NHK morning drama Beppin-san.

Sorakuen and the area around it

Sorakuen began as the private garden of Kodera Tajirō, a former Sanda-domain samurai who made his fortune in business in modern Kobe. Work started around the 1880s and finished in the late Meiji years. The city took ownership in 1941 and opened the grounds to the public under the name Sorakuen, drawn from a phrase in the Chinese classic the Book of Changes. In 2006 the garden was listed as a national Registered Monument for its scenic value.

The pond-stroll garden at the heart of the grounds is laid out so that paths and stone bridges lead the visitor past streams and a small waterfall arranged to suggest a deep mountain valley. A camphor tree said to be roughly five centuries old rises near the entrance, alongside a grove of cycads and banks of azaleas that draw crowds in spring.

Two other Important Cultural Properties share the garden with the Hassam Residence. The Former Kodera Family Stable of 1908, brick below and half-timbered above, is the one major building that survived the war on this site. The Funayakata, a roofed pleasure-boat cabin built between 1682 and 1704, was moved here from the Tarumi district. Like the Hassam Residence, these are not usually open inside, but all add to the look of the garden.

The garden sits just north of the Hyōgo prefectural office. The simplest approach is on the Kobe Municipal Subway Seishin-Yamate Line to Kenchō-mae Station, a five-minute walk to the north. From JR or Hanshin Motomachi Station it is about ten minutes on foot to the northwest. There is no dedicated parking, so public transport is the better choice.