Saihoji Kogaratei

A Shoin Named After a Poem

Kogarashi-tei at Saihōji (西方寺木枯亭, Saihōji Kogarashi-tei) is a single-story timber shoin in Jike, Suzuka City, Mie Prefecture, dating from the early Meiji period and entered on Japan's register of Tangible Cultural Properties on 3 April 2020. It stands in the temple grounds near the Ise Bay shore in the eastern part of the city, attached to the west side of the main hall and facing south.

Most registered buildings in Japan carry the name of the family or institution that owns them. This one carries the name of a poem. Kogarashi is the cold wind that strips the leaves in late autumn, and the room was named by the haiku poet Yamaguchi Seishi (山口誓子, 1901 to 1994) after his own best-known verse on that wind. The Suzuka City cultural properties office describes the building as a small but dignified sukiya-influenced shoin zashiki, and as the symbolic site of literary activity in the district centred on Seishi.

Both halves of that description matter, and they pull in different directions. As architecture, this is a modest room block of 85 square metres. As a place, it is where a major twentieth-century poet came repeatedly to hold verse meetings, and where the papers connected with those visits are still kept.

Plan, Entrance and Fittings

The building is timber-framed, single-story, roofed in sangawara pan tiles under a simple gable, with a floor area of 85 square metres. It abuts the main hall, so the two structures read as one continuous frontage across the eastern half of the precinct.

At the front, on the side nearer the main hall, a shikidai genkan projects forward. The shikidai is a broad low board set at the threshold, historically the point at which a guest of rank was formally received; in samurai residences the right to have one at all was regulated. Its presence here signals that this was a room for receiving people, not a private living space.

Behind the entrance the plan is straightforward and old-fashioned. A saya-no-ma, a shallow sheathing room running along the front, buffers the interior from the exterior wall and doubles as circulation. Beyond it the space divides into two ranks of two rooms each, four rooms in all. The two on the western side carry toko and tana, the alcove and the staggered shelving that together mark the formal end of a reception suite.

The Agency for Cultural Affairs registered the building under the criterion of contributing to the historic landscape of the nation, and calls it a well-made shoin forming part of the temple precinct. The Agency dates it to the early Meiji period, with repairs around 1965 and again in 2012. Local accounts published by the Mie tourism association tell a different story: that the building was constructed in the mid-Edo period in the manner of a samurai residence and moved to the temple at the beginning of Meiji. The two versions can be reconciled if the Meiji date records the relocation rather than the original construction, but the national register does not say so, and the point is left open here.

Yamaguchi Seishi and the Winter Wind

Yamaguchi Seishi was born in Kyoto in 1901 and studied under Takahama Kyoshi. In the early Shōwa years he was grouped with Mizuhara Shūōshi, Takano Sujū and Awano Seiho as the "four S" poets of the journal Hototogisu, and he later left it alongside Shūōshi to become a leading figure in the new haiku movement, bringing urban and industrial subject matter into a form that had largely excluded it. After the war he founded and led the journal Tenrō.

In 1944 he was living on the shore of Ise Bay, at Isetomida in what is now Yokkaichi, having withdrawn there with a chest ailment. On 19 November of that year he wrote two verses on the same subject: the winter wind sweeping down off the Suzuka range, crossing the land and passing out over the water with nothing behind it and no way back. The second of the two became one of the most quoted haiku of the century. Seishi said afterwards that the one-way flights of the special attack squadrons had been in his mind. The verse appeared in his collection Enseï (遠星) in June 1947. The text is not reproduced here; it is carved on the stone in the temple grounds and printed in the collection.

The stone was erected in 1978, cut from Seishi's own handwriting. He named the adjoining shoin after the same wind, and came to it again and again for haiku gatherings during his lifetime. Kept inside are the original sheet he brushed for the monument, along with shikishi poem cards, hanging scrolls, framed pieces, and photographs showing him at the temple around 1952.

This is the reason a building of this size and date carries national registration. Registration under the historic-landscape criterion looks at what a structure contributes to its setting, and here the setting includes a body of writing.

Visiting Kogarashi-tei

Access is unusually easy for a registered property in private religious ownership. The monument and the shoin can be seen at no charge. To go inside, telephone the temple in advance on 059-386-0921 and arrange it; this is a working temple rather than a staffed museum, so a call some days ahead is the courteous approach.

The temple is four minutes on foot southeast of Tsuzumigaura Station on the Kintetsu Nagoya Line, which puts it within easy reach of Nagoya without a car. The Agency for Cultural Affairs records the address as 2904 Jike 3-chōme; the tourism listing gives 3-4-24 Jike, the residential-block form of the same location.

Three things worth seeing stand within a few hundred metres. Koyasu Kannonji, roughly 110 metres away, holds the Shiroko Fudanzakura, a cherry tree designated a National Natural Monument for flowering out of season through the winter months. The Suzuka City Traditional Industry Hall, about 340 metres off, is devoted to Ise katagami, the stencil paper cut for dyeing kimono fabric, and runs carving workshops. The Suzuka Circuit lies about four and a half kilometres inland, which makes this a plausible detour for anyone in the city for a race weekend.