Konishi Choyokan Palace

What the Konishi Choyokan Palace Is

The Konishi Choyokan Palace (小西朝陽館御殿, Konishi Chōyōkan Goten) is a reception building of 1912 in Hashimotocho, Abeno Ward, Osaka City, listed as Registered Tangible Cultural Property in 2017. It is a single-storey timber building with a partial basement and a tiled roof, covering 165 square metres, and it is the largest structure in the compound.

Konishi Choyokan was built as a country house able to lodge members of the imperial family, and the Konishi Choyokan Palace is where that purpose is concentrated. It sits towards the south of the compound, opening onto the garden.

A wooden veranda runs from the entrance at the southeast and turns at right angles around the building. Inside, a main room lies to the north and an anteroom to the south. The main room measures 15 mats, which is not unusually large for a formal reception room; what sets it apart is the ceiling and the alcove wall.

Why It Was Registered

The Konishi Choyokan Palace was registered under the criterion for a model of design. The Agency for Cultural Affairs calls the alcove wall of the main room boldly conceived.

Two features are singled out. The ceiling is an orikage coffered ceiling, in which the flat coffered field is lifted clear of the walls and joined to them by a curved cove. The alcove wall carries both a tokowaki set of staggered shelves and a tsukeshoin, a built-in writing bay. Neither belongs to an ordinary town house.

The section through the building matters as much as the plan. The ground falls away towards the garden, and the builders used that drop to fit a basement under the northern part, with a tea room inside it. A building that reads as single-storey from the approach has a tea room beneath its floor. That is why the Konishi Choyokan Palace is registered as single-storey with a partial basement.

What to Look For

In the main room, follow the edge of the ceiling with your eye. Between the flat coffered field and the wall runs a curved step. That one band lifts the whole ceiling plane and changes how high the room feels.

The alcove wall is the full formal set: the tokonoma recess, the staggered shelves beside it, and the writing bay projecting towards the veranda. The bay is a fixed desk lit through paper screens, and the light falling across it says more about the character of the Konishi Choyokan Palace than any single detail.

South of the main room lies the anteroom. The pairing of a principal room with a lesser one next to it is how a building of this kind fixes the distance between host and guest.

Outside, walk the veranda. It turns square corners as it goes, and the garden opens differently at each turn. Looking back from the garden, the base of the building rises as a faced retaining wall, and the tea room is inside it.

Seeing the Building

The Konishi Choyokan Palace is not normally open. The compound is walled and the building cannot be seen from the public road.

The interior is shown only on the guided days run 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 main room is the centrepiece. A coffered cove flattens badly in photographs, so it is worth standing under it and reading the curve directly.

The tea room in the basement is not opened at every event. Check the notes given out on arrival. Photography rules are also set for each opening. Directions to the compound and the application procedure are on the Konishi Choyokan facility page.