Tsukuda Family Sencha Tearoom Main Building

A Sencha Tearoom Built in 1946, Moved in 1959

Tsukudake Senchashitsu Shuoku (佃家煎茶室主屋, also written Tsukuda-ke Sencha-shitsu Shuoku, and known by the house name Kyunyo-sodo 九如艸堂), the main building of the Tsukuda family sencha tearoom in Otedori, Chuo Ward, Osaka, is a single-storey timber structure raised in 1946 and moved to its present site in 1959; it was entered on the national register of Tangible Cultural Properties on 26 March 2015.

The Agency for Cultural Affairs records the building as one structure of wooden single-storey construction with a tile roof and a footprint of 93 square metres. Those numbers make it small. What they do not convey is how unusual the plan is: two tatami rooms of eleven and a half and seven and a half mats, a corridor, and a standing-style seat called ryurei, arranged for a form of tea that most visitors to Japan never encounter.

Sencha is leaf tea steeped in a small pot and poured into cups. The tea culture built around it, sometimes called bunjin-cha (文人茶) or literati tea, grew out of the Chinese scholarly taste that spread among educated Japanese in the late Edo period. It runs on different assumptions from chanoyu, the whisked powdered-tea ceremony with its rustic four-and-a-half-mat huts. A sencha room hangs Chinese painting and calligraphy, sets out scholar's objects, and invites conversation about poetry over successive small cups. The architecture follows.

The Tsukuda house has been at this address since 1918, when the thirteenth-generation head, Tsukuda Issa (1882 to 1967, art name Shogyoku), shifted the family's base to its old Osaka property at the urging of Count Ichijo Sanetaka. The family traces itself back much further, to a late Muromachi ancestor who practised linked verse and flower arrangement, and through Edo-period generations who kept a secondary post station inn on the Nakasendo highway in what is now Gunma Prefecture. The name Issa-an was granted to Shogyoku in 1897 by Prince Arisugawa Takehito; seven years earlier he had prepared tea in the presence of the Meiji Emperor.

Why the Building Was Registered

Japan protects historic buildings on two tracks. Designation (shitei) covers National Treasures and Important Cultural Properties and imposes strict controls. Registration (toroku), introduced in 1996, is deliberately lighter: owners keep considerable freedom to use and adapt their buildings, and in return the state records them, offers technical advice, and asks for notification before major alteration. Most registered properties are privately owned and still in daily use. This one certainly is.

The main building carries registration number 27-0611 and entered the register in the eightieth round of listings. The criterion applied to it reads zokei no kihan to natte iru mono, meaning a work that serves as a standard of design. Of the three criteria available under the system, this is the one reserved for buildings judged exemplary in their own architectural type rather than merely old or locally familiar.

The official description points to the reason. The room work is sukiya at base: unmilled logs used as posts, menkawa-bashira (posts squared on the faces but left with bark at the corners), select bamboo, and salvaged old timber. Onto that Japanese foundation the builders grafted Chinese-flavoured and plant-shaped details at chosen points. Sukiya carpentry of this quality is not rare in Kyoto and Osaka. Sukiya carpentry adapted to the requirements of sencha, with its Chinese scrolls and its standing-style seating, is much rarer, and very little of it survives inside a major city.

One point deserves care. Osaka Prefecture's heritage database describes several of the rooms as rebuilt in 1945, while the Agency for Cultural Affairs dates the building itself to 1946 with relocation in 1959. The prefectural notes also record that parts of two rooms retain timber from the Bunka era (1804 to 1818). The likeliest reading is that older material was reused in a postwar rebuilding and the whole then moved, but the sources have not been reconciled in print.

Reading the Three Rooms

The eleven-and-a-half-mat room is the larger of the two tatami spaces. The Agency for Cultural Affairs gives its name as Reiko (霊篁); Osaka Prefecture's heritage database gives it as Yuko (幽篁), a classical compound meaning a deep bamboo grove and familiar from Tang poetry. The prefectural reading fits the room, which takes bamboo as its theme. Light falls from a skylight, and moonlight can reach the mats through it. A stringless seven-string kin zither hangs beside the alcove, an instrument that in Chinese literati convention stands for music understood rather than played.

Baikei (梅溪), the seven-and-a-half-mat room, takes its name from a valley where plums grow. A round window carries a worked plum motif. The alcove post is an irregular length of asunaro cypress chosen for its awkward shape rather than its straightness, which is exactly the sukiya instinct. This is the room most often used as the tea seat proper during a gathering.

Ranpu (蘭風) is the ryurei seat, where guests sit on chairs. Its alcove is built tall and wide, unusually so, because sencha gatherings hang large Chinese scrolls that would not fit a conventional Japanese alcove; the back is white plaster to set them off. Indian chintz is applied to the wall surfaces, and the wall itself is cut through in an orchid pattern. Textile facing of this kind belongs to sencha rooms and appears almost nowhere else in Japanese domestic architecture.

A narrow connecting room called Chodo (鳥道), a name meaning a path too slight even for animals, serves as the preparation space. Tea brewed there is carried out to guests, and the room doubles as an entrance from the garden.

Practical matters need stating plainly. The building is not open to the public. Osaka Prefecture's heritage database lists it as closed to visitors, and it functions as the working practice hall of the Issa-an school, in use for lessons on set days each month. Access comes through two routes: enrolling in the school's classes, or catching one of the occasional guided openings organised by heritage groups, which have been held in the past and are announced case by case. Photography permissions are not published, so anyone attending should follow the organiser's instructions on the day.

Getting there is easy. Otedori 1-1 sits just west of Tanimachi-suji, and the building faces south onto the street. Tanimachi Yonchome station on the Osaka Metro Tanimachi and Chuo lines is about five minutes on foot; Temmabashi station, served by the Keihan Railway and the Osaka Metro Tanimachi line, is about seven. Osaka Castle Park lies a short walk east, which makes the neighbourhood an easy addition to a castle visit even for those who only see the tearoom's exterior wall and gate.