Secret Language

Mitsugoan: A Nyakuoji Sukiya House and Three Generations of Modern Japanese Thought

A short climb from the southern end of Kyoto's Philosopher's Path, on a slope just beside the precincts of Kumano Nyakuoji Shrine, sits a two-story wooden residence called Mitsugoan (密語菴). From the lane outside it offers only a glimpse: a tiled roof here, a strip of copper plating there, a fence pressed against the curve of the road. The exterior gives little away. Yet in September 1998 this single building was added to Japan's national register of Tangible Cultural Properties, and the reason has less to do with architecture alone than with the chain of remarkable residents who lived inside it across three generations of modern Japanese thought.

The house is built in the sukiya-zukuri style, a refined form of residential architecture that grew out of the tea-room tradition. Tea-house aesthetics — natural materials, restrained ornament, dimensions that breathe rather than impose — are folded into a layout suited to domestic life. The plan is straightforward: an entrance at the center, the family's living rooms to the west, the tea room and guest reception space to the east. The whole occupies roughly 179 square meters of built area on a generous south-facing plot.

A House That Passed Between Lives

The first owner was Furugō Tokiji, head clerk (bantō) of the Yokohama silk magnate Hara Sankei (Hara Tomitaro, 1868–1939). Hara was one of the great cultural figures of the Meiji and Taishō periods — a silk-trading industrialist who built the Sankeien Garden in Honmoku, Yokohama, where he relocated old temples and pavilions from Kyoto and Kamakura and opened the result to the public. The role of bantō in his enterprise was anything but humble; it was a position of trust commanding the whole machinery of a financial-empire-scale business. Mitsugoan was Furugō's Kyoto base, a counterweight on the western end of an axis that ran constantly between Yokohama trade and Kansai culture.

From the late Meiji into the Taishō period, the name of the house begins to surface in the world of letters. The ethical philosopher Watsuji Tetsurō (1889–1960) lived here. Readers of Japanese intellectual history know Watsuji for Pilgrimage to the Ancient Temples of Nara (Koji Junrei, first edition 1919), one of the most influential modern accounts of Japanese Buddhist art. The original 1919 edition contains a chapter titled "The House at Nyakuoji," a direct trace of his time in this very building. In 1925 Watsuji was appointed to the chair of ethics at Kyoto Imperial University, and the years he spent in this part of the city fed the soil from which his later works on climate, ethics, and Japanese spiritual history would grow.

The lineage continued. After Watsuji's departure, Okazaki Tōkotsu lived here for a time. Then, through the latter half of the twentieth century and into the twenty-first, the house became the home of the philosopher Umehara Takeshi (1925–2019). Umehara was a singular figure in postwar Japan: twice president of the Kyoto City University of Arts, founding director of the International Research Center for Japanese Studies (Nichibunken) in 1987, recipient of the Order of Culture in 1999. His "Umehara school of Japanese studies" cast a wide net across literature, religion, archaeology, and folklore, reaching back into Jōmon prehistory to argue for a deeper, more pluralistic Japan than the conventional narratives allowed. From this house — until his death in January 2019, at age 93 — he wrote, received guests, and looked out at the same Higashiyama slope that Watsuji had watched a lifetime earlier.

An industrialist's deputy, a philosopher of ethics and ancient art, a thinker who reread Japan from the Jōmon forward. Their professions and eras had little overlap. The house gave them, in succession, the same green light through the same paper screens.

Reading the Architecture

To appreciate why Mitsugoan was registered, it helps to know what sukiya-zukuri sets out to do. The style emerged from the tea-room culture associated with Sen no Rikyū in the late sixteenth century and grew, over the following centuries, into a way of building entire houses. Where the earlier shoin-zukuri style of samurai residences emphasized formal hierarchy through alcoves, fixed proportions, and ceremonial flooring, sukiya softened the formula. Posts are slimmer and sometimes left half-rounded. Long nageshi tie-beams are omitted or reduced. Earthen walls in subdued ochres and grays replace painted surfaces. Polished cedar logs and slender bamboo appear where ornament might once have gone.

In a Meiji-era house like Mitsugoan, these choices express a particular cultural moment. The Meiji period (1868–1912) was an age of dramatic Westernization, when railway stations and government offices were going up in brick and stone. The sukiya tradition was the counter-current — a confident continuation of an older, slower way of being in space, kept alive in the houses of merchants, intellectuals, and tea practitioners. Mitsugoan's design splits one roof between two registers of life: the family side to the west, organized around daily routines, and the tea-and-guest side to the east, prepared for the choreography of hosting.

The garden curls around the building on a hillside lot. Slide open the shōji of a study and the Higashiyama slope enters the room. It is not hard to imagine Watsuji at his desk, or Umehara in the next century, lifting a brush or pen and finding the same view answering them.

What to See Nearby

Mitsugoan remains a private home. The interior is not open to the public, and the exterior can only be glimpsed from the lane. Travelers should not approach the building itself. What is available, generously, is the neighborhood that gave the house its character: one of the most rewarding walking districts in the city.

Directly adjacent is Kumano Nyakuoji Shrine, founded in 1160 when the retired emperor Go-Shirakawa enshrined a Kumano deity here as the guardian spirit of nearby Eikan-dō temple. It is one of the three Kumano shrines of Kyoto, paired conceptually with the great Kumano Sanzan pilgrimage centers in Wakayama. A nagi tree on the grounds, about 400 years old, is said to be the oldest of its kind in Kyoto Prefecture; pilgrims setting out for Kumano were once said to purify themselves beneath it. Even on busy weekends the shrine itself stays quiet.

From the shrine, follow the canal northward and you are on the Philosopher's Path (Tetsugaku no Michi), a stone walkway that runs roughly two kilometers along the Lake Biwa Canal feeder to Ginkaku-ji, the Silver Pavilion. The name commemorates Nishida Kitarō, the founder of the Kyoto School of philosophy, who walked here while thinking. In spring the canal is a tunnel of cherry blossom; in autumn the maples flare against the moss. Along the route are Eikan-dō (famous for its autumn maples and its standing Mikaeri-Amida Buddha), Nanzen-ji with its great gate and aqueduct, Reikan-ji, Anraku-ji, Hōnen-in, and finally Ginkaku-ji itself. Half a day of walking can carry a visitor through the very landscape that drew Kyoto's modern philosophers to settle here in the first place.

Mitsugoan cannot be entered, but the air and light around it can be. Spending an afternoon on the Philosopher's Path is, in its way, the most faithful approach to the house: feeling the slope, the canal, and the changing trees that shaped the thinking of those who lived inside.