Izumi City Kuboso Memorial Museum of Art Teahouse Outer Waiting Arbor

Where guests waited to be called

The Izumi City Kuboso Memorial Museum of Art Teahouse Outer Waiting Arbor (外腰掛待合, soto-koshikake-machiai) is a garden shelter for tea guests, built in 1937 in the garden of the Kuboso Memorial Museum of Art in Uchida-cho, Izumi, Osaka Prefecture, and registered as a Registered Tangible Cultural Property in 2006.

A Koshikake-machiai is a roofed bench in a tea garden where guests sit and wait until the host comes out to greet them. This one stands just north of the Main Gate, in the outer Roji that leads to Chosentei, the larger of the two copied tea rooms.

It measures 2.5 by 1.5 ken and covers 12 square metres, a single-storey timber shelter under a copper-sheet gable roof. The north side is open as the bench; the south side holds a storage cupboard.

Why it was registered

The shelter was registered for its contribution to the historic landscape. The Agency for Cultural Affairs notes that it frames the outer roji leading to Chosentei.

More to the point, it is part of a copy. The agency's description of the tea garden says the position and design of the outer waiting bench and the Nakakuguri Gate match the space in front of Zangetsu-tei at Omotesenke. The Izumi City Kuboso Memorial Museum of Art Teahouse Outer Waiting Arbor matters less as a building on its own than as one piece of that borrowed sequence.

What to look for

On the east wall is a Shitaji-mado, a window made by leaving part of the wall's bamboo lath unplastered, here braced with a vertical bamboo strut called a chikara-dake. The agency singles out details like this as evidence of careful work.

Notice which way the bench faces. It opens to the north, so a seated guest looks toward the Nakakuguri Gate and the garden beyond, the direction the path continues.

Visiting

The shelter stands in Chosentei's outer roji. Whether visitors walk through the roji during the Sunday Chosentei opening depends on the arrangements that day; the museum notes that some areas are closed for conservation.

Ask staff before sitting on the bench. Photography of the tea buildings is allowed, but tripods and selfie sticks are not.