Komokuan (Hasegawa Family Residence Detached Wing)

A House Designed by a Painter

Komokuan (去木庵, the detached wing of the Hasegawa Family Residence, also written Kimoku-an) is a wooden building of 1913 at Higashi-Kujō Higashi-Fudanotsuji-chō 5-1 in Minami Ward, Kyoto City, registered as a national Tangible Cultural Property on 28 June 2017.

It stands at the southeast corner of the Hasegawa compound, mostly two storeys with a single-storey portion, tiled roof, covering 65 square metres of ground. The upper floor turns the corner along the street with a narrow veranda enclosed by a balustrade, so the building presents itself to passers-by rather than hiding behind a wall.

The vocabulary is Japanese, with a sukiya inflection that shows in the proportions and the choice of materials. What complicates that reading is the glass. Shōji panels and ranma transoms, elements that would normally be paper and carved wood, use glass extensively here, and the kumiko lattice holding it is worked into an assortment of geometric figures. The family's own guide to the building compares these divisions to Art Deco, which is a fair description of the effect even though the style itself belongs to the decade after the house went up.

Hasegawa Yoshio and Why an Annexe Looks Like This

The Agency for Cultural Affairs credits the design to a painter, and the family identifies him: Hasegawa Yoshio (1884–1942), the eleventh head of the household.

He was born into a landowning family that had farmed Higashi-Kujō since the fifteenth century and served the aristocratic Niwata house through the Edo period, shipping rice, indigo and Kujō scallions up the Takase Canal to the nobility's Kyoto residences. Yoshio entered the newly founded Kyoto Higher Technical School of Arts and Crafts in September 1902, in its first intake. His teachers were Asai Chū, the Western-style painter recently returned from study in France, and Takeda Goichi, one of the most inventive architects then working in Japan. That combination in one classroom explains a great deal about Komokuan: the man who drew it had been taught painting and drafting side by side.

He built it, according to the family's account, as a place for his elder brother to convalesce. That purpose fits the plan. A small building set apart at the corner of a large compound, catching light on two sides, with glass where paper would ordinarily be, is a sensible thing to make for someone who must spend long hours indoors.

Yoshio worked mainly in watercolour and exhibited rarely. He took over as head of the family in 1918 and spent his later years designing the crest and flag for the local Tōka Elementary School and serving as a parish representative at Ugajinja. The registration criterion applied to his annexe was the second of the three used in this category: that a building serves as a model of design.

Seeing It: the Wider Hasegawa Compound

Komokuan cannot be understood on its own, and happily it does not have to be. Three other buildings on the site carry the same registration: the main house of 1742, a storehouse, and the front gate. The main house was registered in June 2013 after a restoration campaign that took over a year and required jacking up more than a hundred columns to correct ground subsidence of ten to fifteen centimetres, a legacy of the Kamo River's flooding.

Since that work the property has operated as the Hasegawa Home of History, Culture and Exchange. It opens on Saturdays only, 10:00 to 16:00, with two long closures each year for changing the displays: from the third Saturday of July to the second Saturday of September, and from the second Saturday of December through 31 March. Admission is 600 yen for adults and 300 yen for elementary school children, dropping to 540 and 270 yen for groups of fifteen or more.

Inside the main house you will find Yoshio's watercolours, the family's Edo-period books and screens, and a hand-woven textile class that meets on the premises. The reception room holds a picture scroll painted by the tenth head of the family when he was thirteen years old, recording the 198 men of the Aizu domain force that camped in Higashi-Kujō in 1864 under the senior retainer Jinbo Kuranosuke. The alcove post nearby carries scuff marks said to have been left by their armour.

Getting There

From Kyoto Station, the Karasuma subway line reaches Jūjō Station in one stop. Leave by exit 1, walk east along Jūjō-dōri, turn north on Takeda-kaidō, then east at the flashing signal; it is about eight minutes on foot. City bus 81 from terminal C4 at the Karasuma side of Kyoto Station stops at Fudanotsuji, three minutes away. Walking the whole way from the Hachijō exit of Kyoto Station takes around fifteen minutes.

Parking is available across on the Kawaramachi side, opposite an ENEOS filling station, but the house asks to be contacted in advance on 075-606-1956 if you plan to drive. That number also handles enquiries about opening on days outside the regular Saturday schedule.

Because this remains a family property rather than a municipal museum, treat photography as something to ask about at the entrance rather than assume.