Former Mushakoji Saneatsu Residence Main House

A House Built Around a Wish for Water

The Former Mushakoji Saneatsu Residence Main House (旧武者小路実篤邸主屋, the surname also written Mushanokōji) is a single-storey timber house at Wakaba-cho 1-chome in Chofu City, Tokyo, completed in 1955 and entered on the national Register of Tangible Cultural Properties on 2 November 2018. It was the last home of the novelist Mushakoji Saneatsu (1885 to 1976), who moved in at seventy and died here at ninety.

Mushakoji had wanted, since childhood, to live somewhere with water. Approaching seventy he went looking for a site on foot, found this slope at Sengawa in western Tokyo, and decided on it at first sight. He called the result the Sengawa house.

The ground he chose is a particular kind of Tokyo landform. The Kokubunji escarpment runs along the edge of the Musashino terrace, and water that has soaked into the plateau emerges partway down the drop. Two ponds sit on the property, one fed directly by a spring. When the surrounding fields were built over with housing through the 1960s, this enclosure of old Musashino woodland survived because a writer had decided to keep it as his garden.

He was already a figure by then. A founder of the literary magazine Shirakaba with Shiga Naoya and others, author of the novels Yūjō and Ai to Shi, and originator of the utopian farming settlement Atarashiki Mura, he is known to nearly every Japanese household for a different reason: small paintings of vegetables inscribed with short phrases, the most famous being a line on the beauty of getting along well together. Much of that late painting was done in this house, along with the autobiographical novel Hitori no Otoko.

Why a House From 1955 Is on the Register

The registration criterion applied here is the one for work that sets a standard in design, and the Agency for Cultural Affairs summarises the building's interest as a good example of the postwar Japanese-style house. That phrase covers a specific and short-lived problem: what a traditional Japanese dwelling should become once the prewar social order behind it had gone.

The answer here, by the architect Yamaguchi Yoshiharu, was to split the treatment in two. Outside, the timber frame is buried under mortar in the ōkabe manner, producing solid, quiet planes that read as mass rather than as a frame of posts and beams. Inside, the detailing shifts to shinkō sukiya, the light modernised teahouse manner that was fashionable in the mid-1950s, with slender members and restrained finishes. Heavy on the outside, delicate within.

The plan works with the slope instead of levelling it. The entrance faces north, on the uphill side; the rooms for living face south, over the fall of the land toward the ponds. A basement is tucked under part of the house, which the official record notes as chikashitsu-tsuki. Construction is timber, one storey, gabled, with a sheet-metal roof, and the registered building area is 195 square metres. Chofu City gives the figure more precisely as 194.54 square metres. The house passed to the city after the writer's death, together with a large body of his papers and possessions, and the grounds opened as Saneatsu Park in May 1978.

Getting Inside, and When

Timing decides what you see. The interior of the house is opened on Saturdays, Sundays and public holidays between 11:00 and 15:00, and the opening is cancelled if it rains. On weekdays you can still look into the rooms through the glass doors from the veranda, which gives a fair sense of the south-facing living space and its relationship to the garden, though not of the rest.

The house stands inside Saneatsu Park, about 5,000 square metres of plum, magnolia, cherry, wisteria, hydrangea and camellia over Musashino ground cover, with an arbour partway round for sitting. The upper pond holds the spring; carp swim in the lower one. A rare golden alga called hikarimo can be seen in the water between early summer and early autumn.

The Chofu City Mushakoji Saneatsu Memorial Museum, which opened next door in 1985, holds the manuscripts, letters, paintings and the art he collected, and changes its exhibition roughly every four or five weeks rather than running a permanent display. Admission is 200 yen for adults and 100 yen for elementary and junior high school students, opening hours are 9:00 to 17:00, and the museum closes on Mondays, on the following day when Monday is a holiday, and over the New Year period. An underground passage links museum and park.

Two practical points that catch visitors out. Photography and audio recording are not permitted inside either the museum or the former residence, so plan on looking rather than shooting. And the park paths involve steps and a steep gradient; staff at the reception desk can direct wheelchair users to a step-free route eighty centimetres wide, but the park interior remains difficult. Mosquitoes are active near the ponds from early summer into autumn, and repellent should be applied outside the buildings.

Sengawa Station and Tsutsujigaoka Station on the Keio Line are each about ten minutes on foot. From Seijogakuen-mae on the Odakyu Line, take a bus bound for Chofu Station or Tsutsujigaoka-eki Minamiguchi and get off at Inarimae, five minutes' walk away.