Restaurant Tokugetsuro Koyo Room

A Room Turned Toward the Garden

Restaurant Tokugetsuro Koyo Room is a single-storey timber tatami room in Minamiharimayacho, Kochi City, built in 1957 and entered on the national register of Registered Tangible Cultural Properties on 25 February 2016. It covers 86 square metres under a hipped roof of pantiles.

The room exists for the garden. Its southern face opens along its full width toward planting that dates from the closing years of the Edo period, roughly a century older than the building itself. The Koyo room was placed, in other words, the way seating is placed in front of something already there.

A pond lies directly in front, close enough that the carp are easy to watch from the mats.

Thin Timbers and a Round Window

Restaurant Tokugetsuro Koyo Room was registered under the criterion for design that sets a standard, with the number 39-0280. It joined the register alongside the Kiku room, the connecting corridor and the main gate, four buildings added on the same day.

The assessment rests on the detailing. Many of the posts are chamfered, which makes the structural members read as slighter than they are. That is standard sukiya practice, but this room does not stop at reproducing it. The Agency for Cultural Affairs describes the work as delicate sukiya handling that also takes on something new.

The alcove wall is generous: a wide alcove with shelving beside it, and next to that a projecting tsukeshoin writing bay whose opening is a circle. A tsukeshoin is a shelf pushed out toward the veranda for reading, usually closed with rectangular paper screens. Here the aperture is round, and in a room built almost entirely from straight lines it is the only curve.

The ceiling is unusual as well. It is a coffered ceiling, but the ribs are set in a geometric figure rather than a plain grid of squares. For 1957 that amounts to testing a new pattern inside the traditional vocabulary of the tatami room.

Looking from Floor Level

Restaurant Tokugetsuro Koyo Room is not a building to inspect on your feet. The relation between garden, screens and ceiling is composed for the eye height of someone seated on the mats.

Start with the round window of the writing bay. The light through it shifts across the day, so the circle reads differently at midday and at dusk. Then look up: the geometry of the ceiling ribs changes with the angle, and the pattern seen from directly beneath is not the pattern seen obliquely from the edge of the room.

Turn back to the garden and the eaves of the hipped roof cross the top of the view, cropping the pond and the planting along a horizontal line.

Remembering that the building is newer than the garden makes the intention legible. The question was how to present an old garden, and 1957 supplied an answer.

Conditions for Visiting

Restaurant Tokugetsuro Koyo Room is in use as a dining room. The official website lists it as the room with the full view of the garden, so guests who want it can say so when reserving. There is no sightseeing admission.

The building stands on the garden side of the site and is not visible from the street. Photography is not covered on the website, so anyone hoping to photograph the round window or the ceiling should ask at the time of booking.

There are steps in the buildings; the house advises that wheelchairs may enter once the tyres are wiped. Opening hours and directions are gathered on the Restaurant Tokugetsuro site page.