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Kyu Iwasaki-tei Gardens

by John McGee

The mansion designed by Josiah Conder at the entrance to Kyu Iwasaki-tei, Tokyo
(Photos: John McGee)

In a crowded city where 3LDK spells luxury, Kyu Iwasaki-tei is a vision of pre-war gentility and privilege. There's a real, two-story, European-style wooden mansion, with fluted columns framing the entrance porch, coffered wood ceilings too high to scrape your head on, and the first Western toilet in Japan.

And that’s only the guesthouse. The owner, his family, and 48 servants and retainers lived around back in a Japanese complex of tatami rooms and courtyard gardens nearly double the size. Here, refinement was seamless paulownia wood ceilings and fusuma (sliding doors) painted with seasonal motifs. 

The 1896 estate, a stone’s skip across Shinobazu Pond from Ueno Park, originally included 20 buildings on nearly 50,000 square meters. The 30 percent of the grounds that remains stand as a park-like testament to the meeting of two key figures in fin-de-siecle Tokyo: a powerful Japanese industrialist and a successful British architect. 

Hisaya Iwasaki (1865-1955) was born in the same thatched roof house in Kochi, Shikoku, as his father Yataro, the founder of Mitsubishi. He graduated from the University of Pennsylvania in 1890, and in 1893 became the third president of Mitsubishi, by then one of the most influential zaibatsu (conglomerates) in the country. He hired Josiah Conder to design the mansion on the estate where he would live for more than 50 years.

Kyu Iwasaki-tei's expansive portico
belies its Tokyo address 

Conder (1852-1920), probably best known outside Japan for his classic text “Landscape Gardening in Japan,” came to Tokyo in 1877 on a government contract to teach architecture and help modernize building technology. He spent the rest of his life here, exerting a lasting influence through the eclectic mix of Gothic, Tudor, “Oriental” and other styles he brought to over 50 buildings in Tokyo. Many of the capital’s first important western style structures were by Conder—the Tokyo Imperial Museum (1881), Meiji government reception hall or Rokumeikan (1883), Nicolai Cathedral (1891), office buildings in Iwasaki-developed Marunouchi—and students of his designed Tokyo Station and the Akasaka Detached Palace. 

For Iwasaki’s mansion, Conder used Jacobean and Pennsylvania country house elements, plus many details novel for the time: wood parquet floors, stained glass, a spiral staircase, and fifteen elaborate stone fireplaces, each unique. For the billiards room next door, Conder built a Swiss-style wood cabin. 

After the end of WWII, Iwasaki donated his estate to Japan (and two Japanese gardens—Rikugien in Komagome and Kiyosumi Gardens in Fukugawa)—to Tokyo and spent his last days in the countryside. Kyu Iwasaki-tei then got abused first by the US military intelligence during the Occupation and later by the Japanese Supreme Court, which knocked down nearly all of the Japanese section to build a horrendous training center they would soon abandon. The Western house finally gained important cultural asset status in 1961 and the remainder of the estate in 1999. Tokyo Prefecture took over management in 2001. 

Following a 13-year renovation sponsored by the Cultural Affairs Agency, the Conder-designed mansion reopened in 2003. After touring its sumptuous interiors, visitors can sip green tea in the impressive Japanese section (designed by Kijuro Ookawa) that’s still extant or have a picnic on the expansive lawn out back.

Kyu Iwasaki-tei Gardens is at Ikenohata 1-3-45, Taito-ku, near Ueno Park in Tokyo, Japan. Tel: 03-3823-8340. Also nearby is the home/museum of Taikan Yokoyama, Japan’s preeminent 20th-century nihonga painter. Nearest stn: Yushima (Chiyoda Line) or Okachimachi stn (JR Yamanote).

©2007 John McGee

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