Konishi Choyokan Entrance Hall

What the Konishi Choyokan Entrance Hall Is

The Konishi Choyokan Entrance Hall (小西朝陽館玄関, Konishi Chōyōkan Genkan) is an entrance building of about 1912 in Hashimotocho, Abeno Ward, Osaka City, listed as Registered Tangible Cultural Property in 2017. It is a single-storey timber structure attached to the south end of the east face of the main house, and its floor area is only 21 square metres.

Small as it is, this is where guests arrived. Konishi Choyokan was a country house kept for members of the imperial family and senior politicians visiting Osaka, so the people who stepped through the Konishi Choyokan Entrance Hall were visitors of rank, and the building was given a formality out of proportion to its size.

The roof is hipped-and-gabled and covered in cypress bark, protected at present by a temporary sheet of copper. Cypress bark was the covering of shrines, temples and palace buildings rather than ordinary houses. Against the tiled roof of the main house, this one small structure announces itself simply by what it is roofed with.

Why It Was Registered

The Konishi Choyokan Entrance Hall was registered under the criterion for a model of design. Elsewhere in the same compound the Gate and Roofed Earthen Wall was listed for contributing to the historic character of the landscape, so the two entries were judged on quite different grounds.

The Agency for Cultural Affairs describes this building as carrying the flavour of a Zen temple. Borrowing the vocabulary of monastic architecture for the porch of a private house is what the assessment turns on. A corridor runs off behind the entrance, and a second corridor leads north from it towards the living quarters. Where that corridor meets the main house the eaves sweep sharply upward, and that single gesture sets the character of the whole.

Konishi Choyokan was extended repeatedly between the end of the Meiji era and the 1930s. The Entrance Hall belongs to the first campaign, dated to about 1912 alongside the Palace, and it shows the taste with which the villa began.

What to Look For

Look up first. The ceiling of the Konishi Choyokan Entrance Hall is made of split bamboo laid side by side to form a surface. The technique is common enough in sukiya tea rooms, but used over a formal porch it takes the stiffness out of the space.

The corridor beyond changes to a funa-zoko ceiling, high in the middle and falling away to both sides like the hull of an upturned boat. Within two or three paces the character of the ceiling has been exchanged for a different one.

The floor deserves a look too. It is laid with sen, flat fired tiles, set on the diagonal at 45 degrees to the walls. That angle is most of the reason a beaten-earth floor reads as crisp and ordered rather than plain.

Then the roof at the junction with the main house. Just before the corridor reaches the older building the eaves lift in a strong curve. After a run of low horizontal roofs the eye is pulled upward. The remark about Zen temples comes from the three things together, the bamboo, the tile floor and that upward sweep.

Seeing the Building

The Konishi Choyokan Entrance Hall is not normally open. The compound is walled private property and the building stands well inside it, so not even its roof is visible from the street. There is nothing to be gained by waiting at the gate.

The interior can be seen only on the guided days arranged by the Cultural Properties Protection Division of the Osaka City Board of Education, held in autumn to coincide with the nationwide opening of modernisation heritage sites. Places are applied for in advance by reply-paid postcard and allocated by ballot. On those days the route into the house runs through this building, so the bamboo ceiling and the tiled floor come first. Groups do not linger, so it is worth taking the ceiling and floor at once, walking into the corridor, and then turning back to catch the curve of the eaves.

Photography rules are announced for each opening. Directions to the compound and the application procedure are set out on the Konishi Choyokan facility page.