Former Nikko Tamozawa Imperial Villa

Ten Buildings, One Continuous Roof

The Former Nikkō Tamozawa Imperial Villa (旧日光田母澤御用邸, Kyū Nikkō Tamozawa Goyōtei, commonly written 日光田母沢御用邸 with the simplified character for sawa) stands at 8-27 Honchō, Nikkō City, Tochigi Prefecture, and its ten surviving buildings, raised between the Tenpō era of the 1830s and 1921, were collectively designated Important Cultural Properties of Japan on 25 December 2003.

Ten buildings is the legal count, and it misleads on first hearing. Walk the site and you find a single sprawling structure of 106 rooms with corridors linking every part, its roofs running together in one unbroken copper surface except where a third storey breaks through. The tenfold division reflects how the complex accumulated rather than how it looks. Each name on the designation list corresponds to a distinct episode of building, moving or extension, and the Imperial Household Ministry's architects worked hard to make the joins disappear.

The villa was created in 1899 for Crown Prince Yoshihito, later Emperor Taishō, whose health was poor and for whom a cool summer retreat was thought necessary. Nikkō had been opened up in the Meiji decades as a resort for foreigners, the titled nobility and industrialists, and the site chosen lies about a kilometre upstream from the Shinkyō bridge at Nikkō Futarasan Shrine, along the Daiya River. Three generations of emperors and crown princes used it before the villa was abolished in 1947. Among them was the boy who became Emperor Akihito, evacuated here in the summer of 1944 as a fifth-year pupil at Gakushūin while Tokyo prepared for firebombing.

The floor area comes to 4,471 square metres, roughly 1,352 tsubo in the traditional measure. Tochigi Prefecture, the present owner, describes it as the largest wooden building in Japan measured as a single structure by floor area, and as the only imperial villa of the Meiji era to survive with its main residence complete.

Why a Summer House Became an Important Cultural Property

Designation in 2003 rested on two criteria at once: excellence of design, and high historical value. The Agency for Cultural Affairs assessment turns on the survival of the whole thing. Imperial villas were built in numbers through the Meiji and Taishō periods at Hayama, Numazu, Shiobara and elsewhere. Fires, wartime damage, postwar disposal and simple demolition took nearly all of them. Tamozawa came through intact.

What survives is also unusually legible as a record of construction practice. Because the complex absorbed older buildings rather than replacing them, three periods of Japanese carpentry sit side by side under that continuous roof, and the differences are visible to anyone who looks at the timber.

Three Periods in One Compound

The oldest fabric is the Gozasho, dated by the national database to the Tenpō era, between about 1830 and 1843. It began life in Akasaka in Edo as part of the middle residence of the Kishū branch of the Tokugawa house. In 1872 the property passed to the imperial family and became the Akasaka Detached Palace; when the Nishinomaru hall of the Edo castle palace burned in 1873 this building served for a time as the temporary imperial residence; from 1889 it housed the crown prince as the Tōgū Gosho, known also as the Hana Goten. It was taken apart in 1898 and re-erected at Tamozawa the following year. A late Edo daimyo mansion, in other words, was moved twice and ended up in the mountains of Nikkō.

The Kōgō Gozasho, or empress's residence, came from a different direction. It was already standing on the site: a villa belonging to Kobayashi Toshiyasu, a banker from the area, built around 1887 and simply incorporated when the imperial villa was laid out. Its pillars and nageshi tie-beams are of tsuga hemlock rather than the finer timbers used elsewhere, which is one way to tell the Kobayashi fabric from the rest.

The remaining structures divide between the 1899 foundation and the great expansion of 1918 to 1921, undertaken after the emperor's health deteriorated and the retreat had to be enlarged for a reigning sovereign rather than a prince. The Ekkenjo audience hall and the Uchi-ekkenjo inner audience hall, both dated 1921, belong to that campaign, and the two are among the largest single elements on the site at 500.62 and 357.05 square metres respectively. The Nyokan-beya quarters for ladies-in-waiting, at 845.45 square metres, is the largest of the ten and dates to the early Taishō years.

The whole compound was designed and supervised by the Takumiryō, the works bureau of the Imperial Household Ministry. The foundation-period design is credited to the bureau's architect Kiko Kiyoyoshi, a specialist in traditional Japanese building, and the Taishō additions to his son Kiko Kōzaburō. That continuity of hand across a generation goes some way to explaining why extensions built twenty years apart read as one house.

Rooms Worth Slowing Down For

The visitor route runs through the main residence, mostly along corridors and antechambers rather than into the rooms themselves. Where you do step onto tatami, staff will ask you to avoid treading on the mat borders, which are silk.

The Gozasho itself, Emperor Taishō's study and sitting room, occupies the ground floor of the old Kishū Tokugawa fabric. It reads at first as a conventional Japanese room with tokonoma alcove and shelving, until you notice that the floor is carpeted and a chandelier hangs from the ceiling. The carpet is Axminster weave in twenty colours, the same specification used in the adjoining Gogakumonjo study and in the audience hall. The Gogakumonjo is sometimes called the plum room for the plum trees painted on the wall beside its alcove.

Upstairs are three rooms that repay attention. The Goshinshitsu, the emperor's bedroom, is floored in plain tatami with no carpet, and is the only room in the villa lit by candlestand rather than electric light. Beside it is the Kenji-no-ma, a three-mat closet holding replicas of the sword and the curved jewel that form part of the imperial regalia, which travel with the emperor on any journey involving an overnight stay; the mats here are bordered in ungenberi, the graded polychrome silk edging reserved for the highest ranks. The Gonippaisho, a room for distant worship toward the imperial ancestors, completes the upper floor.

Above that is the Gotenbōshitsu, the observation room on the third storey, matted and finished in a relaxed sukiya manner quite unlike the formality below. It is not part of the regular route and opens only during occasional special periods, usually in winter.

Elsewhere, the Omote-oshokudō where the emperor dined with officials and guests pairs Japanese sliding doors, walls and ceiling with a Western parquet floor in keyaki zelkova. Some of the glass in its sliding doors is original and visibly uneven, so that the garden ripples slightly as you move past. There is a billiard room, the Otamatsukisho, added in the Taishō expansion. The Kōgō Gozasho keeps tatami rather than carpet throughout, a small distinction from the emperor's rooms on the other side of the house.

The Garden

South of the main residence lies a garden laid out with the villa and open to visitors on the same ticket. Its weeping cherry predates the imperial villa entirely, having been planted in the Kobayashi family garden; estimates of its age range from around three centuries to four depending on the source, and it flowers from the middle of April into the month's final week. The second-floor Kōgō Gogakumonjo, normally closed, is often opened as a spring special during the cherry season, which is when you can look down on the tree from inside the house.

The grounds today cover 39,390 square metres. In the villa's working years the estate ran to 107,000, so what remains is roughly a third of the original.

Practical Information

Admission is 600 yen for adults and high school students and 300 yen for elementary and junior high school pupils, with reduced rates for groups of twenty or more and free entry for younger pupils on the third Sunday of each month. Opening hours are 9:00 to 17:00 from April to October and 9:00 to 16:30 from November to March; the last admission time differs between pages on the official site for the winter season, so anyone arriving late in the day should confirm by telephone on 0288-53-6767. The park closes on Tuesdays, with the following day taken instead when the Tuesday is a public holiday, and from 29 December to 1 January, but stays open without a weekly closure from 15 April to 31 May, 13 to 16 August, 1 October to 30 November and 2 to 5 January.

Photography is normally permitted in the grounds and along the visitor route, with restrictions applying to film and commercial work. Audio guides are available in Japanese and English, information panels carry several languages, and free leaflets are printed in Japanese and English. Allow around 45 minutes for the house and 15 for the garden.

The park lies about three kilometres from JR Nikkō and Tōbu Nikkō stations. Tōbu buses bound for Yumoto Onsen, Chūzenji Onsen, Okusoo or Kiyotaki reach the stop named for the park in roughly ten minutes, and the entrance is a minute's walk from there. By car it is about 3.8 kilometres from the Nikkō interchange on the Nikkō Utsunomiya Road; parking costs 300 yen for two hours for a standard vehicle. The shrines and temples of Nikkō, inscribed on the World Heritage list, are within walking distance downstream.