Kitamura Museum of Art Shikunshien Entrance and Yoritsuki

Where Tea Guests Arrived

Kitamura Museum of Art Shikunshien Entrance and Yoritsuki (北村美術館四君子苑玄関・寄付, Shikunshi-en Genkan Yoritsuki) is the building at Shikunshien in Kajii-cho, Kamigyo Ward, Kyoto City that combines the front entrance with the yoritsuki, the room where tea guests make themselves ready; it was completed in 1944 and registered as a Registered Tangible Cultural Property in 2001.

It is a single-storey timber building with a tiled roof partly finished in cypress bark, covering 65 square metres. It is a late work of the Kyoto master carpenter Kitamura Sutejiro.

At a tea gathering, guests arrive at the yoritsuki, set down their things, straighten their clothes and wait for the rest of the party. Kitamura Museum of Art Shikunshien Entrance and Yoritsuki puts that room at its centre and wraps it with the entrance, a narrow anteroom called the saya-no-ma, and a corridor floored with tiles set on the diagonal. It is a house entrance that works, without alteration, as a tea facility.

Why It Was Registered

Kitamura Museum of Art Shikunshien Entrance and Yoritsuki was registered as number 26-0095 under the criterion for buildings that serve as a model of design. The Agency for Cultural Affairs praises a plan that can serve tea gatherings and an exterior built with a light hand.

The detail the agency dwells on is the yoritsuki itself. It is arranged as a Western-style room and doubles as a ryurei seat, where tea is taken sitting on chairs. In a tea lover's house of the Showa era, chair seating was part of the design from the start.

What to Look For

Step inside the entrance and you are on stepping stones. The earthen floor is laid out like a garden path, a Roji brought indoors; the agency calls it an inner-roji effect.

At the step up into the house is a small room with a nijiriguchi, the low crawl-through door normally used to enter a tea room from the garden, and a round sunken hearth. Placing both at the threshold of a house entrance is, in the agency's words, an unusual conceit.

The Kyoto Tobunkai, the association of owners of registered cultural properties in Kyoto, describes a 3-mat yoritsuki, a long 5-mat saya-no-ma and a ryurei room 2 Ken square. The ryurei room has a parquet floor and a Tokobashira of polished log with the bark edges left on, a Western room built on a Japanese template. On its south side lies a tile-paved earthen floor set a step lower to suit chair seating.

Visiting

Unusually for Shikunshien, part of Kitamura Museum of Art Shikunshien Entrance and Yoritsuki can be seen outside the opening days. From the entrance hall on the 2nd floor of the neighbouring Kitamura Museum of Art you look down through glass onto the Shikunshien entrance and forecourt. When the museum is open, the view comes with a museum ticket.

The interior can be entered only during the spring and autumn special openings. The museum asks visitors not to take photos or video in either the museum or the garden, so the view from upstairs is one to take in by eye.