Itsuo Museum of Art, Sokuan

A Tea Room With Chairs, Conceived by a Railway Man

Kobayashi Ichizō collected tea utensils by the thousand and practised the tea ceremony with the seriousness of a lifelong devotee, but he was also a businessman who liked to solve problems. When he built a tea house on the southeast side of his Ikeda villa in 1936, he added something the classical tea room does not have: chairs. The result, named Sokuan (即庵), is one of the more inventive tea rooms of its era, and it grew directly from his own idea.

The building faces the south garden and reads as a light, quick-footed structure, roofed in pantiles over a hip-and-gable form with copper sheeting at the eaves. At its core is a tea room of three-and-a-half mats in the daime arrangement, where the host's mat is shortened. Around two sides of it runs a floor of quarter-laid tiles (shihan-gawara) set with seating, so that guests may take tea from chairs. The alcove (toko) and the host's place stand side by side; the ceiling is woven of cedar boards in an ajiro plait, and over the earthen floor a bamboo-rafter ceiling is left exposed in the keshō-yaneura manner.

The chairs were not a gimmick. Ichizō arranged the seating, some ten places in all, so that a guest seated in a chair would look out at the same eye level as a guest kneeling on the tatami. The point was to keep the shared visual world of the tea gathering intact while sparing the body the discipline of sitting on the floor.

Why the Tea Room Was Registered

In August 2009 Sokuan was entered in the national register of Tangible Cultural Properties under registration number 27-0531, alongside the villa, its gate, its wall and a second tea house. Like most of the group it was listed for contributing to the historic character of the national landscape, and its interest lies in what it attempts. Here a man steeped in the tradition of tea chose to modify one of its most fixed conventions, the act of sitting, without abandoning the room's spatial logic.

The fusion runs deeper than the chairs. The room marries the vocabulary of the classic tea house, the shortened host's mat, the woven ceiling, the exposed rafters, with a Western willingness to rethink how a body occupies a room, and it does so with enough finesse that it has been called a fine tea room of the Shōwa era. The plaque hung beneath the eaves was brushed by Hatakeyama Issei, himself a noted collector and tea practitioner, which places the room within the circle of early-twentieth-century industrialists who took the tea arts seriously.

Sokuan also outlived its original setting in an unusual way. When the Itsuō Museum of Art moved to its new building in 2009, the design was recreated there as a room called Sokushin-an, where tea is still served to visitors on Sundays during exhibitions. Few registered tea rooms can be said to have a working descendant.

What to Look For on a Visit

Stand where the tea room meets the tiled seating and take in the two logics at once. On one side is the compact discipline of a daime tea room, the host's mat drawn in close; on the other, a run of chairs on quarter-laid tiles inviting a very different posture. That the two can share a single small building without friction is the whole achievement.

Look up at the ceiling, where cedar boards are plaited into an ajiro weave, and then at the earthen-floored area where bamboo rafters are left bare overhead. These are the textures of a traditional tea room, and Ichizō kept them even as he changed how guests would sit. If you visit the newer museum nearby, you can experience the idea directly in its recreation, taking a bowl of tea from a chair while looking out as though you were seated on the mats.