Itsuo Museum of Art

A Two-Mat Tea Room That Keeps the Old Rules

If the tea house called Sokuan shows Kobayashi Ichizō remaking the rules of tea, the one called Hiin (費隠) shows him keeping them. It stands at the southeast corner of the south garden of his Ikeda villa, and it is very small: a tea room of just two mats, with a floor area of only 7.8 square metres. Where Sokuan experiments with chairs, Hiin holds to the intimate, orthodox form of the classic small tea room.

The building runs on an east-west ridge under a gabled roof sheathed in copper, with a small eave over the east face. Its posts are slender rounds, only 8 to 9 centimetres across, and the walls are finished in a pale-yellow earth plaster. At the western end of the north wall is a nijiriguchi, the low "crawl-in" entrance through which a guest stoops to enter, a gesture that levels everyone who passes it. On the west face a cusped katō-mado window is cut into the wall, and above it hangs an inscribed plaque. Inside, the two-mat room carries a shallow muro-doko, an alcove recessed into the wall.

Everything about Hiin is turned toward the traditional atmosphere of tea: the small scale, the earthen walls, the stooping entrance, the shallow alcove. It is the classical counterpoint to Sokuan a few steps away.

Why the Tea Room Was Registered

In August 2009 Hiin was entered in the national register of Tangible Cultural Properties under registration number 27-0532. Here the listing differs from its companions in a telling way. The villa, gate, wall and Sokuan were all registered for contributing to the historic character of the national landscape; Hiin alone was listed under a different criterion, as a work that serves as a model of design. The distinction marks it out as valued less for its place in the compound than for the quality of the tea room itself.

The room's name carries its own history. It is said to have been bestowed by Konoe Fumimaro, the former prime minister, with whom Ichizō was connected through his term as Minister of Commerce and Industry in the Konoe cabinet. A tea room named by a head of government sits comfortably within Ichizō's world, where the tea arts served as a meeting ground for the political and business figures of the day.

Hiin was built in 1944 and was later moved within the grounds, so its present position is the result of relocation rather than its original site. The records of those moves are not wholly consistent, and the room is best described simply as having been relocated to where it now stands. What has not changed is its character: a compact, carefully made tea room that reads as a study in the classical idiom.

What to Look For on a Visit

Come to Hiin after seeing Sokuan and the contrast does the work. Where the chair room opens itself up, Hiin draws in. Crouch to the height of the nijiriguchi and you feel the intention of the low entrance, which asks even the powerful to bow their heads on the way in. The slender round posts and the pale earthen walls give the interior a hushed, close feeling that two mats make almost inevitable.

On the west wall, find the katō-mado, its cusped outline a soft shape cut into the plaster, and the plaque set above it. Then look at the shallow muro-doko inside, an alcove pared back to its simplest form. These are the elements a tea master would read at once, and together they explain why this particular little room was singled out as a model of its kind rather than merely as part of a famous estate.