Wada Family Residence Waiting Arbor

A Tea-House Touch by the Back Gate

The Wada Family Residence Waiting Arbor (和田家住宅待合, Wada-ke Jūtaku Machiai) is a tiny open-fronted shelter built in 1930 on the Wada family estate in Miyamotocho, Kishiwada City, Osaka Prefecture, and registered as a Registered Tangible Cultural Property on 21 August 2002. It stands east of the main house, right beside the kitchen gate on the east edge of the property.

Its building area is just 3 square metres, about two ken (roughly two bays) long. A Kirizuma-zukuri gabled roof of Hongawarabuki tiles covers it, the north side is left open, and the walls are finished to look like rough clay. Inside is a bench, and the wall facing the main house has a shitajimado, a window made by leaving the lattice of the wall core exposed.

Why It Was Registered

The Wada Family Residence Waiting Arbor was registered as a model of its type. The Agency for Cultural Affairs describes it as a structure that shows how a large household lived, designed in the manner of a tea-garden waiting shelter.

In a tea garden, guests wait in a small roofed bench shelter, the Koshikake-machiai, before being called in for the ceremony. Here that vocabulary has been brought to the service side of the estate. Its place next to the kitchen gate suggests it was where people calling at the back entrance waited to be received, though no record of how it was used has been found.

What to Look For

The rough clay walls and the lattice window come straight from tea-house design. A shitajimado leaves part of the wall unplastered so that the bamboo or reed lattice beneath shows through, giving a very small opening a rustic texture.

At 3 square metres the arbor covers less than two tatami mats, yet it carries the same heavy tiles as the rest of the estate. Only the north side is open, so anyone sitting inside is partly screened from view.

That tea-room details reach even a back-door waiting spot says a good deal about how this household lived in the early Showa years.

Visiting the Waiting Arbor

The Wada Family Residence Waiting Arbor is inside the walls, just within the kitchen gate, and is not open to the public. It is largely hidden from the street.

From outside, the closest you can get is the kitchen gate it adjoins. Directions and visiting etiquette for the estate are on the Wada Family Residence page.