Suisei Shoin

A House Built to Wait In

Suisei Shoin (水西書院) is a two-storey timber house of 1886 at Kawanishi in Iwakuni City, Yamaguchi Prefecture, built as a temporary residence for the Kikkawa family, former lords of the Iwakuni domain, and entered on the national register of Tangible Cultural Properties on 15 February 2000.

The circumstances are worth stating plainly, because they explain the building. In 1886 the Kikkawa family had no permanent house in Iwakuni. Their new residence was under construction and would not be finished until 1888. Suisei Shoin was put up to cover the interval.

Temporary buildings are usually cheap. This one was not. It runs to 305 square metres of floor area over two storeys, with a hipped roof of pantiles, a tea room attached, and a thirty-mat hall on the upper floor. A family that had governed a domain for two and a half centuries built an interim house at the scale it expected to receive guests in.

That expectation was met. After the permanent residence was completed, Suisei Shoin was kept on as the family's reception building, and Iwakuni City records that guests here included Inoue Kaoru, the Chōshū statesman who served repeatedly in the early Meiji cabinets, along with members of the imperial household.

The Plan, and the View It Was Built Around

The interior arrangement is documented in the national record and is unusually specific for a registered property.

Downstairs there are two fifteen-mat reception rooms with a matted edging strip running alongside. Upstairs, a single thirty-mat hall with a boarded veranda. The whole upper floor, in other words, is one room, and the boarded edge that surrounds it is where you stand to look out.

What you look at is the point. The record states that the house is composed to take Shiroyama and the Kintaikyō bridge as shakkei, borrowed scenery: landscape outside the property line pulled into the composition by the placement of openings.

Shiroyama is the wooded hill on the far bank, about two hundred metres high, crowned by Iwakuni Castle, which the first lord of the domain, Kikkawa Hiroie, built in 1608. The Kintaikyō is the five-arched wooden bridge of 1673, a Nationally Designated Place of Scenic Beauty and the image most associated with the city. The house sits on the west bank of the Nishiki River, which is what its name records: Kawanishi means west of the river, and Suisei carries the same sense in Sino-Japanese reading.

So the borrowed view is not incidental. A reception building on the west bank, opened toward the east, faces the bridge and the castle hill together. The upper-floor hall was placed where that view could be had over the flood embankment, and thirty mats of open floor gives a large party the same sightline.

Why It Was Registered

Suisei Shoin was registered under the criterion covering buildings that serve as a model of design. Registration is a lighter form of protection than designation, introduced in 1996 to keep large numbers of Meiji, Taishō and Shōwa buildings in use rather than in aspic; alterations require notification rather than permission. Suisei Shoin carries registration number 35-0035 and was included in the twenty-second round, registered on 15 February 2000 and gazetted on 2 March.

The design case rests on the composition rather than on any single element. A Meiji house that adopts the sukiya sensibility, attaches a tea room, and organises its rooms around a specific external prospect represents a strand of domestic architecture that continued the taste of the late Edo elite into the modern period. Buildings of this kind were plentiful once and are now scarce, since most were privately held and few survived the twentieth century intact.

Ownership changed around 1950, when the building passed to Iwakuni City. It has been in municipal use since, and the register lists the city as owner.

One point of variation between sources deserves noting. Iwakuni City states that the Kikkawa residence was completed in 1888, after which Suisei Shoin became a reception building. A local tourism site gives 1892 as the year the family stopped using it as a dwelling. The city's account is followed here.

Visiting

Set expectations before going. Suisei Shoin is not a museum and does not keep visiting hours. Iwakuni City operates it as rentable rooms and a meeting space, and it is opened when a booking is in progress. A visitor arriving unannounced should expect to see the exterior only, and anyone hoping to look inside should contact the city in advance to ask what is possible on a given day.

The exterior is worth the short detour on its own. The address is 4-2-4 Kawanishi, close to the western end of the Kintaikyō. Kawanishi Station, served by the JR Gantoku Line and the Nishikigawa Seiryū Line, is about fifteen minutes on foot from the bridge, and the house lies within that same walkable area. Coming from JR Iwakuni Station on the main line, a bus to the Kintaikyō takes around twenty minutes.

Photography of the exterior from the public street is unrestricted. Interior photography would depend on the terms of whatever booking is running and is a question for the city. The cherry trees along the Kawanishi bank are locally known and put the house in a different setting in early April; the bridge is lit after dark from mid-March to 1 June and again from mid-August to mid-January, which changes the walk back rather than the house itself.

Two other Meiji buildings are within reach on the same side of the river. Kinunkaku, an ema hall of 1885 in the grounds of Kikkō Shrine, was raised when the Kikkawa residence site was opened as a park. The former Iwakuni School building of 1870 also survives as an education museum. Together with Suisei Shoin they give a compact reading of how the town rearranged itself once the domain ended.