Enkikan (former Saito Family Residence) Main Building

A Merchant's Reception Wing, Moved into a Public Park

Enkikan (燕喜館), registered as the Main Building of the Former Saitō Residence (旧斎藤家住宅主屋, also written Saitou-ke), is a Meiji-period reception wing standing in Hakusan Park in Chūō Ward, Niigata City, built in 1908 and entered on the national register of Tangible Cultural Properties on 28 April 2000.

The building did not begin as a park pavilion. It was the entertaining half of a large house belonging to the Saitō Kijūrō family, one of the merchant dynasties that made their money from shipping and trade when Niigata was a busy port on the Sea of Japan. The house stood on Higashibori-dōri, in the dense old commercial grid a short distance east of here, and the section the family called Enkikan was the part reserved for receiving guests.

When the family gave that section to the city, Niigata took it apart, moved it to a corner of Hakusan Park, and put it back together with new tea rooms added. It opened in the autumn of 1997.

Relocation usually costs a building something, and it is fair to say what was lost. The gate on the street side and the entrance behind it were added after the move for practical reasons; the original entrance was on the other side, facing Hakusan Shrine. What survived intact is the part that mattered most, the sequence of formal rooms and the veranda that opens onto water.

Timbers You Could Not Buy Today

The style is sukiya, the manner developed out of the tea room and carried into the reception rooms of wealthy houses. Sukiya work is deliberately understated. It rejects the heavy bracketing and bright pigment of formal shoin architecture in favour of slender members, unpainted wood, and expensive restraint that only reveals itself to a visitor who looks closely.

So look closely.

The purlin and the nageshi rails run about eighteen metres, and they are single pieces of timber rather than lengths joined end to end. A tree capable of yielding a straight, clean beam of that length is effectively unobtainable now. In the okuzashiki, the innermost formal room, a cedar post is cut so that all four faces show straight grain, which requires a log of considerable diameter to produce one post. There is a low storage cupboard with a curved front, a chandelier, and a lantern in Kiyomizu ware from Kyoto.

The sliding-door paintings and the pierced ranma transoms above the lintels are where the household spent on ornament, and they repay slow attention rather than a quick circuit.

The plan does one thing very well. The formal rooms and their veranda face the lotus pond of Hakusan Park, so the room and the garden read as a single space with a sliding edge between them. That relationship was true of the original house and its own garden, and it is one of the reasons this particular park corner was chosen.

The Suikinkutsu, and What to Order

Buried in the main garden is a suikinkutsu, a water chime. The device is simple and slightly improbable: a jar with a small hole in its base is buried upside down under a stone basin, water drips through the hole into a shallow pool inside the jar, and the buried chamber resonates the sound of each drop into a faint bell-like note. You have to be quiet to hear it.

Matcha and coffee are served inside for a fee, which is the intended way to spend time here. Sit facing the pond, order a bowl of tea, and let the visit take thirty minutes rather than five.

A separate small tea house in the grounds, Shimin Chatei Yūjin, was built with donations marking the twentieth anniversary of the Niigata citizens' tea gathering and is rented out for tea ceremony.

A note on the four main rooms. The okuzashiki, the outer formal room, the living room, and the tea room are all available for hire for cultural activities, which means that on any given day one or more of them may be occupied. Rooms not in use can be viewed at no charge. If a specific room is the reason for your visit, telephone ahead.

Visiting, and a Distinction Worth Getting Right

Enkikan opens from 9:00 to 17:00 for viewing, with hire slots running later. It closes on the first and third Monday of each month, moving to the following day when that Monday is a public holiday, and from 29 December to 3 January. Viewing is free.

From JR Hakusan Station on the Echigo Line the walk takes about twenty minutes. By bus, get off at Shiyakusho-mae and walk three minutes; the city hall is directly opposite. Drivers should use Hakusan Park car park A, in front of the building. The park car parks hold roughly six hundred vehicles between them and charge 100 yen per thirty minutes for a standard car.

Now the distinction. Niigata City's own page describes the moved portion as having been designated, and a number of guidebooks repeat this. The national record is clear that Enkikan is a Registered Tangible Cultural Property, registration number 15-0073, registered on 28 April 2000 and gazetted on 17 May. Registration and designation are different instruments under the same law. Registration, created in 1996, applies to buildings roughly fifty years old or older and leaves owners considerable latitude to adapt and use them, which is exactly what allows a listed building to operate as a rentable civic tea house.

One date also needs care. The Agency for Cultural Affairs gives the construction year as 1908. Several travel guides give 1907 or say "around 1907". Take the official figure.

If the Saitō family interests you, their villa survives too, on Nishiōhatamachi about two kilometres away. Its garden was designated a National Place of Scenic Beauty in March 2015. Two other city-run historic houses, the former Ozawa Residence and the former Bank of Japan branch manager's residence known as Sakyūkan, are within a short journey, and Enkikan is a component of the Japan Heritage story on the Kitamaebune shipping ports.