Asahi Beer Oyamazaki Villa Museum of Art Main Building

Asahi Group Oyamazaki Villa Museum: The Main Building

The house that anchors this museum on the wooded flank of Mount Tennozan was not drawn up by a professional architect. Its owner, the Osaka financier Kaga Shotaro (1888-1954), designed it himself, and his hand reached from the floor plan down to the furniture, the tableware, and even the paper his lunches were wrapped in. He wanted a residence that answered a view he had carried home from Europe. The sweep of the Thames below Windsor Castle stayed with him, and he found its echo here, at the point where the Kizu, Uji, and Katsura rivers braid together on the plain below the hill.

Kaga built the villa through the Taisho era, with a further wing added in 1927. He gave it an English face, drawing on Tudor Gothic architecture, the style current in Britain around the turn of the sixteenth century. A half-timbered three-story block, its dark timbers set against pale walls, meets a lower single-story range under a steep gabled roof, and the two arms form a T on the ground. The roof reads as tile from a distance but is in fact sheet metal pressed into a tile pattern, a practical touch beneath a picturesque silhouette.

Step inside and the mood shifts from English cottage to something grander. The interior is worked in a Jacobean idiom, the heavy, ornamented manner of early seventeenth-century England, and Kaga laced it with private jokes and local pride. One reception room carries a diamond lattice pressed into the plaster, a relief of bamboo shoots that nods to a local specialty of Oyamazaki, and, if you look closely, griffins guarding the Kaga family crest. Stained glass and carved detail fill rooms that once served as living and dining space for the family.

Why It Is a Registered Cultural Property

In 2004 the building was entered on Japan's register of Tangible Cultural Properties, a national list that protects structures judged worth passing on, with a lighter touch than the stricter Important Cultural Property designation. Six structures on the estate were listed together that July, among them this main building, two tea houses, an observation tower, the former garage, and the brick entrance tunnel. The main building's citation singles it out as a model of design, the criterion applied to works that set a standard others can learn from.

What earns the phrase is the combination the house pulls off. The varied exterior, part cottage and part manor, sits comfortably in its setting, while the rooms behind it hold a dense, confident decorative scheme. That an amateur, however wealthy and well traveled, produced a building of this quality is part of the point. Kaga had studied in Britain, climbed in the Alps as one of the first Japanese mountaineers to do so, and later helped found the company that became Nikka Whisky. The villa reads as the built form of a life spent absorbing European ways and translating them for a Japanese hillside.

What to See When You Visit

The villa reopened in 1996 as a museum, and the rooms Kaga furnished now hold the collection assembled by Yamamoto Tamesaburo, the first president of Asahi Breweries and a friend of Kaga's. Yamamoto backed the Mingei folk-craft movement, so the cases here carry ceramics by Kawai Kanjiro, Hamada Shoji, and the British potter Bernard Leach, alongside textiles and lacquer by other makers of that circle.

Two additions by the architect Tadao Ando extend the visit without crowding the old house. The Chichu-kan, which Ando named the "jewel box in the earth," is a cylindrical gallery sunk into the slope so as not to disturb the setting, and it holds Claude Monet's Water Lilies as a standing display. A second annex, the "Dream Box," opened in 2012 for changing exhibitions. Back in the main building, the former bedroom on the upper floor is now a cafe whose terrace looks out over the three rivers and the hills beyond.

The house sits about a ten-minute walk uphill from Yamazaki Station on the JR line and Oyamazaki Station on the Hankyu line, though the climb is steep and a free shuttle runs from the JR side. There is no car park. Photography is welcome in the garden and on the terrace but not inside the galleries. The grounds, some 5,500 tsubo of pond-and-hill garden, are worth lingering in, especially when the maples turn in late November.