Why is the “One-Mat Room,” Matsuura Takeshirō’s study, so carefully preserved at ICU?

Among the buildings in the Taizansō complex, the main house (now lost), Machiai and Kōfūkyo were old buildings from the Edo and Meiji periods that were moved to their current location from elsewhere. Kōfūkyo is particularly venerable, having been built in 1925 by the lord of the Kishū Tokugawa clan, Tokugawa Yorimichi. It is a building with a six-mat tearoom, mizuya and a study. The study deserves special recognition for being created by Matsuura Takeshirō.

Known as the man who gave Hokkaido its name, Matsuura Takeshirō traveled all over Japan from the end of the Bakumatsu and into the Meiji period. Approaching his seventieth birthday, he designed the One-Mat Room as a small study for him to spend his final years. After writing to friends and acquaintances he had met on his travels and spending several years collecting pieces of old wood from shrines and temples around the country, he built the One-Mat Room as an addition to his house in Kanda Gokenchō in 1886. As the name suggests, the space consists of a single tatami mat surrounded by wooden edging, with a tokonoma, kamidana, and bookshelves. It is built from some 90 pieces of wood with long histories stretching from the Hakuho era (645-710) to the Edo period (1603-1868).

After Takeshirō's death, the One-Mat Room passed into the hands of Tokugawa Yorimichi, lord of the Kishū Tokugawa clan, who relocated it first to his private library, Nanki Bunko, in Azabu, and again to Kōfūkyo in Yoyogi-Uehara. When Yorimichi died, the businessman, Keisuke Yamada, bought Kōfūkyo for his Taizansō villa and it was moved to its current location in Mitaka in around 1936. Later, ownership of the One-Mat Room passed to the Nakajima Aircraft Company and, after the war, to ICU, which still owns it today.

Throughout its history of multiple owners and many changes of location, the One-Mat Room faced the danger of destruction from the Great Kantō Earthquake (1923) and the firebombing of Tokyo during the war. In fact, Takeshirō himself had specified in his will that, upon his death, the wood from the One-Mat Room be used to cremate his remains. The fact that this structure, which is so unique architecturally and historically, has transcended more than 140 years to be preserved at ICU could be described as a miracle. Taizansō, including the One-Mat Room, is registered as Tangible Cultural Property, and ICU is committed to its preservation and utilization as an invaluable heritage.