Mushakoji Senke Main House

A Tea Family's House with Its Tea Rooms Inside

The Mushakoji Senke Main House (武者小路千家主屋, Mushakōji Senke Shuoku) is a two-storey timber residence of about 1881 on the west side of the Mushakoji Senke tea school's compound in Kamigyō Ward, Kyoto City, and it was registered as a Registered Tangible Cultural Property on 8 November 2004.

Roofed in Sangawara-buki pantiles and covering 201 square metres, the Mushakoji Senke Main House is the largest of the four registered buildings. Its living rooms sit at the centre, and around them are three tea rooms, Hanpōan, Kansuien and Gyōshūtei, plus a memorial room holding a statue of the tea master Sen no Rikyū. The national database gives the reading Mushanokōji Senke Shuoku; the school itself says Mushakōji.

Why It Was Registered: A Plan Only a Tea House Would Have

The Mushakoji Senke Main House was registered as a building that has become a model of its type. The Agency for Cultural Affairs singles out two things: the approach, which leads from the front gate through the Roji garden path to the entrance, and the plan, in which three tea rooms and the Rikyū memorial room wrap around the living quarters. It calls this arrangement characteristic of a tea family's house.

The three rooms differ in size and mood. Hanpōan is four mats with a recessed alcove; Kansuien is a seven-mat reception room that reads as eight with its alcove; Gyōshūtei is a small room of three mats and a three-quarter host's mat, the format known as sanjō daime. Guests enter by the inner entrance, wait in the anteroom and are shown to whichever room is in use that day.

The master carpenter is recorded as Hirai Gisuke. The Agency dates the house to about 1881, which is when Isshisai rebuilt the tea rooms and part of the garden after the fire of 1854.

What to Look For: The Rooms Inside the Mushakoji Senke Main House

Hanpōan

Hanpōan is a four-mat room with a small square alcove, or masudoko, built into the mat area, and a central post beside a hearth cut forward into the floor. The alcove base is pine, the alcove post red pine with its bark on, and the central post a length of magnolia (kobushi). The crawl-in guest entrance, the Nijiriguchi, is closed with two wide board doors. Take them out and the whole front garden opens up. The lantern, the stone basin and the planting are all kept low, so that from a seated position the garden looks deeper than it is.

Its ancestor is said to be Ippōan, a room favoured by Jikisai with one wall set at an angle to avoid the garden well. Ippōan burned in 1788; Ittotsusai rebuilt it in altered form as Hanpōan; that burned in turn in 1854, and Isshisai put it back in 1881.

Kansuien

Kansuien is a seven-mat room with a Tokonoma one ken wide and half a ken deep, giving eight mats of floor in all. It was originally a tea room in Jikisai's taste in the house of the Yagura family, purveyors to the Aizu domain; Isshisai acquired it and moved it here, adding a three-mat-and-daime side room on the east to make it work as a reception room.

The alcove post is barked red pine and the alcove rail is striped persimmon. The openwork in the transom is cut in the shape of a spinning top, the Mushakoji Senke family crest. The school says the name board under the gable is in the hand of Matsudaira Fumai, lord of the Matsue domain.

Gyōshūtei and the Sodō

Gyōshūtei is a sanjō daime room with the hearth cut into the front of the host's mat and a plain wall in place of an alcove. Its name, "boat pavilion," comes from the boat-bottom ceiling of exposed rafters and the paper windows on either side, which recall a pleasure boat. Until Isshisai's time it served as the family's Buddhist altar room, so it has neither a nijiriguchi nor a stone basin.

The Sodō, built by Isshisai, is a four-and-a-half-mat room that doubles as a shrine to Rikyū. The alcove post is an old camellia trunk from Sōken-in, a subtemple of Daitokuji. To its right a large round window opens onto a raised inner chamber where Rikyū's statue sits. The ceiling slopes in over the entry and has a push-up skylight. The name board, reading Tōtō, is by Matsudaira Yorihisa of the former Takamatsu ruling house; the word evokes the sound of waves and, in tea, the sound of the kettle coming to the boil. Isshisai took it as one of his own names.

Viewing the Mushakoji Senke Main House

The Mushakoji Senke Main House is not open to the public and its interior cannot be visited. It lies at the far end of the garden path inside the gate; from Mushakōji-dōri you can see only the gate and the boundary wall.

The tea rooms inside are still used for lessons and gatherings. For photographs of the rooms and their alcoves, the tea-room pages of the school's official website are the best place to look.