Izumi City Kuboso Memorial Museum of Art Teahouse Umemi Gate

The threshold between two gardens

The Izumi City Kuboso Memorial Museum of Art Teahouse Umemi Gate (梅見門, Umemi-mon) is a garden gate 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.

It stands facing south on the boundary between the outer Roji of Chosentei and the inner roji of Soan. The national database reads the name Umemi-mon; Osaka Bunkazai Navi gives the alternative reading Baiken-mon. Either way the name means a gate for viewing plum blossom.

It is a small udegimon, a gate whose eaves rest on side brackets, just 1.0 m wide under a copper-sheet gable roof. The posts are unsquared logs, the double doors are bamboo lattice, and the space above the lintel is left open.

Why it was registered

The Izumi City Kuboso Memorial Museum of Art Teahouse Umemi Gate was registered for its contribution to the historic landscape. The Agency for Cultural Affairs says it copies the Umemi Gate of Zangetsu-tei at Omotesenke and describes it as simple but valuable.

The agency's account of the tea garden also names this gate, on the boundary with Soan's garden, as a copy of the Omotesenke roji. It is the point where a guest leaves the world of the larger reception room and enters the more austere world of the small tea room, reproduced in the same form as in Kyoto.

What to look for

The gate is little more than two log posts and a pair of bamboo lattice doors. You can see through it into the inner garden even when it is shut. Osaka Bunkazai Navi remarks that the garden spaces here were copied as faithfully as possible.

Try two viewpoints. From the outer garden you see the gate head-on with the stone well curb to one side; from the inner garden, looking back, the gate becomes the start of the path to Soan. The Inner Waiting Arbor stands just to the east.

Visiting

Beyond this gate lies Soan's inner roji, and the museum lists Soan as closed to the public. Whether you can approach the gate during the Sunday Chosentei opening depends on the arrangements that day.

Some areas are closed for conservation. Photography of the tea buildings is allowed, but tripods and selfie sticks are not.