Masui Family Tea House

Four Rooms, No Two Alike

The Masui Family Residence Tea House (増井家住宅茶室, Masuike-jūtaku Chashitsu) is a sukiya-style tea complex in Ōgimachi, Takamatsu City, Kagawa Prefecture, completed in 1912 (Meiji 45) and entered on the national register of Tangible Cultural Properties in 2009.

1912 is a narrow target. Meiji 45 lasted only until the end of July, when the emperor died and the calendar rolled over to Taishō 1. This building went up in the last months of the era that had begun with the abolition of the domains, and it went up in a city where the domain lords had taken tea seriously for two and a half centuries.

The block stands south of the Shoin, its ridge running north to south, at right angles to the two buildings that face the street. That orientation is the first clue to its purpose. The main house and the reception wing are addressed to the public road; the tea house turns its back on all of it and addresses the garden.

The register gives a building area of 99 square metres and lists a naka-kuguri and a machiai as attached elements, meaning the registration covers not only the building but two structures out in the garden. Rooms run in a line from the north: eight mats, then four mats, then a six-mat mizuya or preparation room. Attached at the southwest corner under its own gable roof is a four-mat room called Unmon-an (雲門庵).

The detail that gives the complex its character sits in a single phrase of the official description: the design of the sliding panels and the windows differs from room to room. Not a house style applied uniformly, but four rooms each given its own treatment.

The Approach Is Part of the Architecture

A tea house is not really a building you enter. It is a sequence you pass through, and the garden path leading to it does as much work as the room at the end.

Guests gather first at the machiai, a small open shelter with a bench where the party waits until the host signals. Nothing happens there except waiting, which is the point: the shelter exists to slow arrival down and to gather people who came separately into a single group.

Then comes the naka-kuguri. This is a low gateway set in the garden wall or hedge, dividing the outer garden from the inner one, and it is built deliberately too small. You have to duck. A guest passing through it puts his head down whether he wants to or not, and rank outside the garden stops applying from that point on. Few Japanese gardens contain a piece of architecture whose whole function is to make people bow.

The roof over the main block is a gable clad in sangawara, single-lap pantiles, with an eave carried out over the approach. Notice the choice. Both the main house and the Shoin are roofed in hongawara, the heavier and more formal pairing of flat and semi-cylindrical tiles. Pantiles are lighter, cheaper and thinner in profile, and here that is not economy but manners: sukiya architecture borrows the vocabulary of the farmhouse and the hermitage on purpose, and a formal roof over a tea room would contradict the whole exercise.

Inside Unmon-an

The four-mat room at the southwest is the one the official record describes in most detail. A toko alcove stands against the west wall, and the ceiling combines ajiro with a kakekomi section.

An ajiro ceiling is woven: thin strips of cedar bark or bamboo plaited into a diagonal or checkered pattern and fixed as a panel overhead. It reads as basketry rather than carpentry, and the texture catches low light in a way that flat boards do not.

A kakekomi ceiling is the sloping kind. Instead of a level plane across the whole room, part of the ceiling follows the underside of the rafters down towards the eave, so the room is high at one end and low at the other. Tea masters used the device to compress the space over one part of the room and lift it over another, most often lowering the ceiling where the host works and leaving it higher above the guests. It is an asymmetry you feel in the body before you notice it with your eyes.

The name Unmon-an draws on Zen vocabulary. Yunmen (雲門 in Japanese reading, Unmon) was a Tang-dynasty Chan master whose lineage became one of the five houses of Chinese Chan, and names of that kind are common for tea rooms, whose whole aesthetic developed in close conversation with Zen practice. No document explaining the family's reason for the choice was found in the sources consulted, so the connection is offered as context rather than as established intent.

Takamatsu is a reasonable place to find a merchant family building a tea complex in 1912. Ichiō Sōshu, a great-grandson of Sen no Rikyū and founder of the Mushakōjisenke line, was appointed tea instructor to the Matsudaira lords of Takamatsu, and successive heads of that line served the Takamatsu house until the Meiji Restoration. Kikugetsutei in Ritsurin Garden, the large tea pavilion the lords used for entertaining, still stands a few kilometres away. Tea was not an imported enthusiasm here.

Practical Notes for Visitors

The Masui Family Residence Tea House is part of a private residence and is not open to the public. There are no visiting hours, no admission fee, no tea gatherings open to outsiders and no interior access. The Agency for Cultural Affairs record lists no owner name, no managing body and no public access provision, and no scheme of periodic opening has been announced. Unmon-an, the woven ceiling, the waiting shelter and the low gateway described above are known from the official record, not from any visitor route.

Because the tea house stands behind the Shoin and faces an interior garden, essentially none of it can be seen from the street. What is visible at 1-58-2 Ōgimachi is the frontage of the main house and the long street elevation of the Shoin. Please view those from the public road, keep your voice down, and do not enter the property or attempt to see into the garden. Photographing the street elevations from public ground is generally acceptable; do not photograph into the property or towards residents.

The site is about a ten-minute walk northeast of JR Shōwachō Station on the Yosan Line, and roughly 1.3 kilometres southwest of JR Takamatsu Station, some twenty minutes on foot.

If what you want is to sit in a tea room rather than read about one, Ritsurin Garden is the answer, about four kilometres south. Kikugetsutei (掬月亭), the sukiya-style pavilion once used by the Takamatsu lords, admits visitors from 9:00 to 16:30 with last reception at 16:00, and serves matcha with a sweet for 800 yen or sencha with a sweet for 600 yen; garden admission is separate, 500 yen for adults and 170 yen for children, with the garden itself open from 7:00 to 17:00 depending on the season. Higurashitei (日暮亭), a second tea building in the same garden, keeps shorter hours and generally opens at weekends and on public holidays. Hiunkaku (披雲閣) in Tamamo Park, about 1.7 kilometres east of Ōgimachi, was designated an Important Cultural Property in 2012 and opens for general viewing during announced periods. Confirm current hours and fees before travelling, since all of these are revised periodically.