Kyū-Iwasaki-tei Garden Audio Guide

Kyu-Iwasaki-Tei Garden: what does the audio guide cover?

1. 01

   Welcome to Kyu-Iwasaki-Tei Garden

   Welcome to Kyu-Iwasaki-Tei Garden, known in Japanese as 旧岩崎邸庭園. It is a metropolitan garden in the Ikenohata district of Taito Ward, Tokyo, and your map places it along Shinobazu Avenue. The estate began as the main residence of the Iwasaki family, the founders of Mitsubishi, and it now opens its grounds to the public. The house was completed in 1896 and combined two ways of living. A grand Western-style mansion stood beside a traditional Japanese residence, all set within a broad lawn garden. At its height the property covered 15,000 tsubo, a traditional Japanese unit of area, and held more than 20 buildings. Only a fraction of that survives today, but what remains still conveys the ambition of a family at the center of Japan's rush toward modernity. Over the next few minutes we will look at the people who owned this hillside before the Iwasaki family, the Western house and the Japanese hall that still stand, and the long, strange period after the Second World War. Stay with me, because this land has had more lives than almost any garden in the city.

2. 02

   Kyu-Iwasaki-Tei Garden: Samurai Lords and a Famous Swordsman

   Long before the Iwasaki family arrived, this ground belonged to the samurai class. In the Edo period it was a daimyo estate of the Sakakibara clan of Echigo-Takada domain. When the old order collapsed in the early Meiji years, the land passed to the Makino family of the former Maizuru domain. In 1871 the abolition of the domains sent many lords home to their old territories, and the Tokyo estates were left almost empty and overgrown. The government took them over, and this plot was then handed to Kirino Toshiaki, a Satsuma army officer who is better remembered as Nakamura Hanjiro, nicknamed the man-slayer Hanjiro. He was a subordinate of Saigo Takamori. In 1878 the founder of Mitsubishi, Iwasaki Yataro, established his residence here, and the estate later passed to his son Iwasaki Hisaya. Because the land changed hands so many times, no plans of the Iwasaki-era garden survive, and much about how it first looked is unclear. What is known is that the new estate kept the spirit of a daimyo garden, with garden stones, stone lanterns and artificial hills, alongside a broad Western-style lawn.

3. 03

   Kyu-Iwasaki-Tei Garden: Conder's Western House

   The Western house is the star of the estate. It was designed by the British architect Josiah Conder, who was invited to Japan to build Western-style architecture. It is a wooden building in the style of seventeenth-century English Jacobean architecture, with touches of the Renaissance and Islamic design woven in. In the Meiji era, building in a Western manner was practically a national mission, and receiving guests in a Western house was how an important family showed its standing. The Iwasaki mansion went up at the peak of that Western architectural fashion. Conder also taught architects such as Tatsuno Kingo and Sone Tatsuzo, so his influence spread far beyond this one house. Look for the sunroom beside the house. Photographs survive of Iwasaki Hisaya, the third head of Mitsubishi, and his family gathered there. Near the main gate, a little way up the slope, you will also see a grand sleeve wall bearing the family crest, the three-tiered diamond. That crest later became the basis of the Mitsubishi company emblem. Plans of the house show how it was altered and enlarged again and again over time.

4. 04

   Kyu-Iwasaki-Tei Garden: The Japanese Hall and Wartime Aftermath

   The Western house was the formal reception space. Daily life in a grand Meiji home usually took place in the Japanese wing, and it was the same here. The Japanese residence, built in the shoin style, was linked to the Western house by a corridor with a ceiling shaped like a ship's hull. Tradition names a master carpenter, Okawa Kijuro, as its designer. Look for the family's diamond crest worked into the nail covers. At its peak the Japanese residence covered 550 tsubo. After the Second World War, American forces took over the estate. In 1953 it passed into state ownership and became a training institute for court clerks. Around 1969 about 460 tsubo of the Japanese living quarters were pulled down. Only the great hall, the next room and the third room, plus a tea room waiting area, the corridor and a toilet, remain. One scholar, Muramatsu Teijiro, reportedly said that the Japanese wing might have been more valuable as cultural heritage than the Western house, a realization that came only after the demolition. Most of the original furnishings are gone. The bookshelves in the study survive because they had been moved to the family's villa in Atami before the seizure. In 1996 the institute moved away to Wako in Saitama, and the grounds you walk today became possible.

5. 05

   Before You Head Off from Kyu-Iwasaki-Tei Garden

   As you wander, try reading the land in layers. Beneath the lawn is a daimyo estate, then a swordsman's residence, then the home of a business dynasty, and finally a government training campus. Each left its mark, and some of those marks are still easy to spot. Look for the three-tiered diamond crest on the sleeve wall and on the Japanese hall's fittings, and compare it with the three diamonds you may know from the Mitsubishi emblem. Notice how the Western house and the Japanese rooms speak two different architectural languages, yet were designed to live side by side. Try to picture the vanished wing that once stretched out across the grounds. The Iwasaki family had another garden too. Tonogayato Garden in Kokubunji, in western Tokyo, became a villa of the family in 1929 under Iwasaki Hikoyata. If this place leaves you curious, it makes a natural next chapter in the family's story.