Hiunkaku (former Takamatsu Villa of the Matsudaira Family)

A Lord's House Rebuilt on His Family's Castle

Hiunkaku (披雲閣, also written Hiun-kaku), formally the Former Matsudaira Family Takamatsu Villa, is a large timber residence of 1917 standing in the third bailey of Takamatsu Castle at 2-1 Tamamo-chō, Takamatsu City, Kagawa Prefecture, designated an Important Cultural Property on 9 July 2012. The designation covers three buildings: the main hall, the storehouse attached to it, and a second storehouse.

Takamatsu Castle was one of the great sea castles of Japan, its moats fed by the Inland Sea and, even now, home to sea bream. The Matsudaira ruled here from 1642 until the abolition of the domains. In 1914 the twelfth head of the house, Count Matsudaira Yorinaga, began building a villa on the site of the Edo-period palace that had occupied the third bailey. The frame was raised in 1915 and the work finished in 1917. The name was inherited from that earlier palace rather than invented.

The contractor was Shimizu-gumi, forerunner of today's Shimizu Corporation, which handled design and construction together under a single contract. That arrangement matters to the designation. This is not a building put up by a master carpenter working from memory and habit; it is a work of a modern corporate organisation, drawn, costed, and supervised, and the Agency for Cultural Affairs cites exactly that as one reason for its importance.

The layout follows Edo precedent all the same. A formal entrance faces south, toward the site of the Sakura-gomon gate. Wings holding reception rooms, living quarters, and household offices are strung together by covered corridors around a series of small courtyards. Gardens open to the north, on the sea side, laid out at the same time as the house by Ōgo Kanzō, a gardener brought from Tokyo, and retaining Edo-period rockwork and artificial hills in places.

Truss Roofs Over Tatami: Why It Was Designated

The main hall covers 1,916.51 square metres of ground. It is single-storey apart from one room, roofed in pantile with hipped-and-gabled and hipped forms, and a porte-cochère projects from the west end of the entrance front so that a carriage or car could draw up under cover. The whole plan, corridors included, was set out on a single column module of six shaku five sun, about 1.97 metres. Designing a building of this sprawl on one consistent grid is an act of drawing-board discipline rather than carpentry tradition.

The showpiece is the Ōshoin. Three rooms of twenty-eight mats sit side by side east to west, with an aisle on three sides and a corridor beyond that; counting the aisle, the seating area reaches 142 mats. An alcove two and a half ken wide and one ken deep occupies the west wall, its front rail finished in black lacquer, with a staggered shelf of the torii type and a small cupboard beside it. Chandeliers in Japanese taste hang from the coffer-free ceiling of exposed battens.

Next along is the Sotetsu-no-ma, named for the cycads outside, an eighteen-mat room and a twenty-one-mat room with aisles on all sides and further verandas beyond on three. Its glazed sliding screens have their glazing bars set in unusually narrow vertical divisions. Floors here are boarded rather than matted, and the ceiling over the room proper is a coffered grid.

Both of these wide rooms are carried on Western-style trusses. Everywhere else the roof uses the traditional Japanese framing of stacked beams and struts. That division is the argument of the building in miniature: the trusses buy the span that a 142-mat room needs, and nothing about them shows in the finished interior. The two criteria cited in the designation, technical excellence and high historical value, both point here.

The other designated buildings are quieter. The attached storehouse, roughly 7.9 by 4.9 metres, is two storeys under a gabled pantile roof with weatherboarded walls. The second storehouse, about 4.9 by 9.8 metres, is thought to date from the closing years of Taishō, and is finished in imitation stone render over a truss-framed roof. A rear gate, two curved screen walls, a well house, and two garden pavilions are protected as attached items.

Getting In: A Building That Is Usually Closed

This is the practical point most visitors need and few sources state plainly. Hiunkaku is not run as a house museum. Takamatsu City, which owns it, hires it out as a venue for tea gatherings, concerts, and photography, and outside those bookings it is generally shut. Regular public opening does not exist.

There are two exceptions each year. The building is opened to visitors during the free-admission days of 1 to 3 January, and again on 5 May, the anniversary of the park's opening to the public. Those two windows are the reliable way to see the Ōshoin without renting it.

The grounds are another matter and are open daily. Hiunkaku stands inside Tamamo Park, the maintained remains of Takamatsu Castle, where admission is 300 yen and free for anyone under eighteen. Opening hours shift by month: the west gate, nearest JR Takamatsu Station and the Kotoden terminus, opens from 5:30 a.m. in high summer and as late as 7:00 a.m. in midwinter, closing between 5:00 and 7:00 p.m. depending on the season. The east gate, by the Kagawa Museum, keeps shorter hours. The park closes from 29 to 31 December. From the grounds you can walk the whole exterior of the house and see the north garden, the porte-cochère, and the great sweep of the Ōshoin roof.

Hiring is arranged through the Tamamo Park management office on 087-851-1521. Rooms are let by half day or full day, the Ōshoin at 12,000 yen for a full day and smaller rooms from around 1,500 yen, with double rates for commercial use, and use is possible from 8:30 a.m. to 6:00 p.m. between April and September, an hour less in winter. Seismic strengthening has been carried out room by room since 2020, so parts of the building may be unavailable; ask when booking.

Walking there takes about five minutes from JR Takamatsu Station. The castle ruins were designated a National Historic Site on 2 March 1955, and Hiunkaku had already been listed as a Takamatsu City Tangible Cultural Property on 6 October 2005 before the national designation followed seven years later.