Former Yasuyuki Namikawa Residence Workshop

The Building Where the Enamels Were Made

The Workshop of the Former Namikawa Yasuyuki Residence (旧並河靖之邸工房, Kyū-Namikawa Yasuyuki-tei Kōbō) is a single-storey timber building in Horiike-cho, Higashiyama Ward, Kyoto, built around 1902 (Meiji 35) and listed as a Registered Tangible Cultural Property of Japan in 2001. It stands east of the main house within the compound now open as the Namikawa Cloisonne Museum of Kyoto.

The building covers about 52 square metres under an irimoya hipped-and-gabled roof laid with sangawara pantiles. Two rooms make up the interior: a four-and-a-half mat tatami parlour and a room finished in Western manner. A kiln house projects from the southeast corner. The national record notes a remodelling in 1911 (Meiji 44), and the building was at some point converted from workshop use into living quarters, though the record does not tie the two events together.

Namikawa Yasuyuki (1845-1927) ran a substantial operation here. According to his adopted daughter's recollections, the business employed forty to fifty craftsmen at its height in the mid-1890s, the years around his appointment as an Imperial Household Artist in 1896. Secondary accounts state that the compound once held two workshop buildings, the second standing southeast of the residence across the pond, outside the present museum boundary; that building was demolished in 1995. The surviving structure was refitted as the museum's second exhibition room when the house opened to the public.

Registered for a Different Reason Than the House

The workshop was registered on 12 October 2001, notified on 29 October, under register number 26-0092 in the thirtieth round of registrations. The criterion cited is that the building contributes to the historic landscape of the nation. This differs from the main house, which was registered as a model of design, and the difference tells you something about how the assessors read the compound.

The house is a piece of architecture worth studying on its own terms. The workshop earns its place as part of a surviving whole. Meiji-era export craft was made in buildings like this across Kyoto and Nagoya, and almost none of them remain standing beside the homes of the people who ran them. What survives here is the shape of a working life: sell at the front, live in the middle, make at the back.

Japan's registration system, introduced in 1996, was built for exactly this kind of case. It covers buildings roughly fifty years old or more and operates by notification rather than permission, so owners retain practical control over use and repair. Designation as an Important Cultural Property brings stronger protection but far tighter constraints. For a group of modest working buildings that needed to stay usable, the lighter framework was the workable one.

Reading the Interior

The first thing to register is how much storage there is. Shelving and built-in cupboards fill the walls in numbers that make no sense for a two-room dwelling and perfect sense for a workshop handling metal bodies, wire, powdered glazes and finished stock. Ceilings change treatment from one space to the next, giving the small interior more variety than its footprint suggests.

The craft practised here was yusen-shippo, wired cloisonne. Ribbons of gold or silver wire barely wider than a hair are glued edge-on to a metal body to draw the outline of a design, a stage called shokusen. Glaze is then laid into the cells between the wires and the piece is fired at around 800 degrees, after which it is ground and polished flat. Colours are built up over repeated firings. Yasuyuki developed a transparent black glaze that gave his pieces their characteristic lacquer-dark grounds, and he refined the wirework until the lines read almost like brushstrokes.

Water mattered as much as fire. Polishing consumed a great deal of it, and the pond in the garden, fed from the Lake Biwa Canal completed in 1890, supplied the workshop's needs while also serving as the view from the main house. The garden was laid out by Ogawa Jihei VII, known as Ueji, and is designated a Place of Scenic Beauty by the City of Kyoto.

Visitors should adjust their expectations on one point. This is not a preserved workshop with tools laid out at the bench. The room was converted to residential use long ago and now serves as an exhibition space. Tools, working drawings and preparatory designs from Yasuyuki's practice are shown here and elsewhere in the museum, so the craft is explained, but the setting reads as a room rather than a shop floor. Standing in it while looking at the finished enamels is the point: the distance between raw work and finished object is about ten metres.

Practical Notes

The workshop is seen as part of a single museum visit and carries no separate ticket. Opening hours run from 10:00 to 16:30 with last entry at 16:00, and the museum closes on Mondays and Thursdays, shifting to the following day when a public holiday falls on one of those. Long closures apply in summer and winter. The 2026 summer break runs from 21 July to 14 September, and the winter break generally covers mid-December to early March, so the practical visiting seasons are spring and autumn.

Displays change between the spring and autumn exhibitions, drawing on the roughly 130 enamels Yasuyuki kept for himself. The autumn 2026 exhibition, running 15 September to 20 December, is titled after the technique of Namikawa cloisonne.

Admission is 1,000 yen for adults, 900 yen for students with a student card, and free for high school students and younger. Cash only. From Higashiyama Station on the Tozai subway line, exit 1 leads to a three-minute walk east. Buses 201, 202, 203 and 206 stop at Higashiyama Sanjo, five minutes away. There is no parking. Ask at reception about photography, as the museum does not publish a policy online.