Konishi Choyokan Moon-Viewing Pavilion

What the Konishi Choyokan Moon-Viewing Pavilion Is

The Konishi Choyokan Moon-Viewing Pavilion (小西朝陽館月見台, Konishi Chōyōkan Tsukimidai) is a covered walk and room of 1932 in Hashimotocho, Abeno Ward, Osaka City, listed as Registered Tangible Cultural Property in 2017. It is a single-storey timber structure with a tiled roof covering 32 square metres, at once the passage linking the Palace with the New Palace and a room projecting over the garden.

Those two roles define it. You walk through the Konishi Choyokan Moon-Viewing Pavilion, and partway along you can stop and sit. As its name says, it was built for looking at the moon, and it stands closer to the garden than anything else in the compound.

The projecting part is carried on kake-zukuri, posts planted on the slope that lift the floor clear of the ground. It is the system used for the great stage at Kiyomizudera in Kyoto. Applying it to a single room in a private house is uncommon.

Why It Was Registered

The Konishi Choyokan Moon-Viewing Pavilion was registered under the criterion for a model of design. What the listing recognises is the ease with which one structure carries both a corridor and a formal room.

The roof is gabled and laid with pantiles, with copper used only on the eaves canopy. The covered walk runs 12.8 metres. Its west face is a tall solid wall, so anyone walking through sees nothing on that side. Only the east, towards the garden, is open. What a visitor sees while walking has been decided by closing everything else.

The room itself is a single matted space, with an alcove and staggered shelves along its north side. A small room hung off the middle of a corridor has been given the equipment of a proper reception room.

What to Look For

Look up in the walk. The ceiling is worked into a shallow vault, neither flat nor the boat-bottom form used elsewhere in the compound, but a continuous curve running the full 12.8 metres. Walking it, the crown of the vault retreats ahead of you and the passage reads as longer than it is.

The southern half of the floor is laid with cedar boards, and the change underfoot is noticeable when you step from the walk into the matted room.

Inside, look at the alcove and the shelves beside it. Fitting these into a small room at the side of a corridor was a way of declaring that the Konishi Choyokan Moon-Viewing Pavilion counted as a formal room for moon-viewing, not merely a wide spot in a passage.

From outside, go round to the garden and look up. The posts of the kake-zukuri stand on the slope with the floor lifted above them. Seen from there, this light structure slots between the two heavier reception buildings on either side, and the logic of the compound becomes readable.

Seeing the Building

The Konishi Choyokan Moon-Viewing Pavilion is not normally open. It lies inside the walled compound and cannot be seen from the public road.

The only access is 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 visitors pass through the Konishi Choyokan Moon-Viewing Pavilion on the way from the older Palace to the New Palace. It is a transit point and groups keep moving, but the vaulted ceiling and the cedar boards can both be taken in while walking.

Whether the matted room itself is opened varies by event, as do the photography rules. Directions to the compound and the application procedure are on the Konishi Choyokan facility page.