Gallery Reunion

A 1953 Coffee House on a Shinsekai Side Street

Gallery Saikai (ギャラリー再会, Gyararī Saikai, sometimes rendered Gallery Reunion, since saikai means reunion) is a two-storey timber building completed in 1953 in Ebisu-higashi, Naniwa Ward, Osaka, and it was entered on Japan's national register of Tangible Cultural Properties on 15 May 2007. It stands on one of the streets that radiate outward from the Tsutenkaku tower, about two minutes on foot from the tower's base.

People stop because of the front elevation. A gable ornament cut into interlocking geometric shapes rises above the upper floor. Beneath it sits a shallow balcony carried on twisted, barley-sugar colonnettes. Lamps modelled on gas lanterns flank the doorway. The Agency for Cultural Affairs register compares the effect to stage scenery, which is a fair reading. This front was built to be seen across a narrow street, in a district that in 1953 still ran on cinemas, variety halls and the crowds they pulled in.

Step back from the decoration and the plan is ordinary Osaka. The frontage measures three ken (roughly 5.4 metres) and the depth ten ken (roughly 18 metres), the long narrow proportion of a merchant townhouse, or machiya. A courtyard splits the building in two, with a covered passage linking the shop at the street to the living quarters behind. The structure is wood, the roof slate, the building area 97 square metres.

It opened as Junkissa Saikai. A junkissa is a "pure coffee house", a café licensed to serve coffee and cake but no alcohol, a distinction that mattered a great deal in the entertainment quarters of the period. Saikai means "reunion". The current owner credits the design to the architect Osamu Ishii, who later took the Architectural Institute of Japan's prize for his residential work, though the Agency for Cultural Affairs register lists no designer.

Film actors are said to have come here during the boom years. A clock and a mirror upstairs are described as gifts from Chiezō Kataoka, one of the great swordplay stars of Japanese cinema. The café eventually closed, and the building was taken on by the second-generation president of the Radium Onsen bathhouse company, which owns it today under the name Ebisu Kōgyō. A refurbishment finished in 1997 and it reopened as a gallery.

Why This Building Is on the Register

Japan protects historic buildings at two very different intensities, and the difference is worth understanding before you read any plaque. A designated Important Cultural Property or National Treasure carries heavy legal obligations and, usually, heavy restrictions on change. A registered Tangible Cultural Property, the category introduced in 1996, works the other way round. The owner keeps the building in use, notifies the authorities before major alterations, and receives tax relief and technical advice in return. The system was designed for exactly this kind of property: privately owned, still working, and roughly fifty years old or more.

Gallery Saikai carries registration number 27-0414 and was accepted in the 54th round of registrations. The criterion applied was "a model of design" (zōkei no kihan to natte iru mono), the strongest of the three grounds available, reserved for buildings whose composition or detailing sets a standard.

Two things earned it that. The first is the survival of the townhouse plan under a thoroughly foreign-looking skin. Courtyard, passage, shop-and-dwelling sequence: the bones are those of an Osaka merchant house, while the ornament borrows from a vaguely Mediterranean vocabulary that owes nothing to the Kansai tradition. The second is date. A building finished in 1953 was only fifty-four years old when it joined the register, and postwar commercial architecture has been slow to attract protection anywhere in Japan. Shinsekai lost a great deal in the war and rebuilt fast and cheaply. Very little of what went up in those years was built to last, and less still has survived with its street front intact.

The building has also been selected for Osaka's Living Architecture Museum programme, a city-backed initiative that treats the whole city as a collection of buildings in use rather than a set of monuments.

Visiting, and What You Can Actually See

Practical matters first, because they shape the visit. Gallery Saikai is a private building and it is not open on a fixed daily schedule. The exterior can be seen at any hour from the public street, and that is how most visitors experience it.

The interior opens on specific occasions. Jazz performances have been held here on a recurring basis, and the building takes part in Open House Osaka (Ikefes Osaka), the free architecture weekend held across the city each autumn, when it is among the properties opened to the public. Anyone hoping to get inside should check the owner's website or the festival programme before travelling rather than turning up and knocking.

If you do get in, the staircase is the thing. It curves up from the ground floor in a single sweep, and the upper room retains a brick fireplace, a chandelier and a grand piano. In the café years the ground floor is said to have drawn a younger crowd while the upstairs was kept for couples, and the room was used for omiai, the formal introductions that preceded arranged marriages.

Outside the door stands a small stone marker recording the site of the former Kissa Saikai. Photography from the street is unproblematic. This is a working street with residents on it, so tripods and long stays are best avoided.

Getting there is easy. Ebisuchō Station on the Osaka Metro Sakaisuji Line is about five minutes away on foot; Dōbutsuen-mae, served by the Midōsuji and Sakaisuji lines and by JR, is a similar distance. Tsutenkaku, Janjan Yokochō and the deep-fried skewer restaurants that define modern Shinsekai are all within a few hundred metres, which makes the building an easy addition to an afternoon rather than a trip in itself.