Former Ichijo Ekan Sanso Villa (formerly Located in

Former Ichijō Ekan Sansō: a Kyoto prince's villa rebuilt in a Kamakura garden

A record survives of a tea gathering held in this building in 1646, when it still stood among the wooded hills of Nishigamo in northern Kyoto. The man who built it was Ichijō Ekan, the ninth son of Emperor Go-Yōzei, a courtier who twice held the highest offices a non-emperor could reach: sesshō (regent) and kampaku (chief advisor to the throne). The thatched structure you can visit today in Kamakura is that very villa, dismantled and reassembled some 480 kilometres east of where it was first raised.

Ekan designed the building himself. From the outside it reads almost as a farmhouse, with a low thatched roof and timbers that look gathered rather than milled. That plainness was deliberate. He was drawn to the look of coppiced woodland, and chose materials that carried the texture of the countryside into the rooms. Step closer and the refinement shows: the joinery of the sliding screens, the painted cedar doors, the careful play between rough and polished. It is the work of a man who knew exactly how rustic he wanted to appear.

Why it became an Important Cultural Property

The building was designated an Important Cultural Property on 26 May 1964, classed as a pre-modern residence of the early Edo period. Its value lies in being a rare surviving example of sukiya-zukuri built by a member of the imperial family in the first half of the seventeenth century, the same generation that produced two of Japan's most celebrated court estates.

Those two estates are worth naming, because Ekan was related to both. Katsura Imperial Villa was built by his uncle, Prince Hachijō-no-miya Toshihito. Shugaku-in Imperial Villa was the project of his elder brother, Emperor Go-Mizunoo. Set beside them, the Ekan villa belongs to the same refined aesthetic conversation taking place within the court at the dawn of the Edo period, when princes who held little political power turned their attention to gardens, tea, and the deliberate art of looking simple.

The single structure measures 13.0 metres along the front and 7.0 metres in depth, a single storey under a hip-and-gable thatched roof. The lower edges are finished in clay pantile, and the pent roofs on the north and south faces are laid with thin wood shingle. That mixture of roofing in one small building is itself part of what makes it unusual.

From a Kyoto estate to the Kamakura hills

After Ekan's death the villa passed to the Daigo family, who descended from his line, and served as their country retreat. Over the following centuries the larger estate fell into decline. By the end of the Second World War, the thatched tea house was effectively all that remained.

In 1959 the surviving building was taken apart and moved to Kamakura, to a slope at Jōmyōji facing the old Kanazawa road. The relocation was overseen by the architect Horiguchi Sutemi, a leading scholar of teahouse design. Garden stones and the dry-landscape arrangement were carried east along with the timber and set out as they had been in Kyoto, so that the building did not arrive in Kamakura alone but with the ground it had always sat upon.

The Nameri River runs along the southern edge of the grounds, and the wooded hillside presses in behind. The garden, planted afterwards by a Tokyo landscape firm, leans into that setting rather than tidying it away. The result feels less like a Kyoto garden transplanted and more like one that found a second home.

What to look for when you visit

Most visitors come for the garden, which is open throughout the year and changes character with the seasons. June brings hydrangeas, and the grounds keep a calendar of flower-filled water basins, where blossoms are floated in stone chōzubachi for visitors to photograph. Late autumn turns the maples; spring brings moss and new leaf. Red pine, bamboo, and a dry-stone composition give the garden structure even when little is in bloom.

Near the entrance stands a small thatched gate, a feature shared with Katsura Imperial Villa, which sets the tone before the villa itself comes into view. The building is usually seen from the outside, its thatch and rough columns framed by the trees.

The interior is the real prize, and it is shown only on certain days by guided tour. Inside, the cedar-door paintings and the detailing of the screens carry the atmosphere of the seventeenth-century court into a room you can sit in. Among the courtly buildings of this era, the chance to actually step inside is uncommon: at Katsura and Shugaku-in the halls are admired from the path, never entered. Here, on a tour day, you can.

A teahouse café beside the stream, run by a Kyoto confectioner, serves wagashi and matcha, which makes it easy to slow the visit down rather than treat it as a quick stop.

Getting there and nearby

The villa sits in the Jōmyōji district in eastern Kamakura, across the old Kanazawa road from Jōmyōji temple. From the east exit of Kamakura Station on the JR Yokosuka Line, take a Keikyū bus from stand 4, ride about ten minutes to the Jōmyōji stop, and walk two minutes. There is no parking on site, though coin lots sit within a short walk.

The location pairs naturally with the temples of eastern Kamakura, including Jōmyōji and Hōkokuji with its bamboo grove a little further along the same road, so the villa fits well into a half-day walk through this quieter side of the city.