Kyu Asakura House: The Taisho Timber Villa and Cliffside Garden

Why is it significant?

Remove your shoes and step onto the fragrant tatami straw mats of the Kyu Asakura House, an extraordinary two-story timber mansion completed in nineteen nineteen during the Taisho era.

Key Facts

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Remove your shoes and step onto the fragrant tatami straw mats of the Kyu Asakura House, an extraordinary two-story timber mansion completed in nineteen nineteen during the Taisho era. Built by Torajiro Asakura, a wealthy politician who served as chairman of the Tokyo Prefectural Assembly, this magnificent residence is a designated Important Cultural Property of Japan. Miraculously surviving both the nineteen twenty-three Great Kanto Earthquake and the second World War air raids, it offers a rare glimpse into aristocratic pre-war life.

The house is a supreme masterwork of traditional Sukiya-zukuri carpentry: unpainted cedar beams, delicate sliding paper shoji screens, and ceiling boards cut from single enormous ancient cedar logs demonstrate the pinnacle of Japanese woodworking. Every room opens onto expansive covered verandas, or engawa, blurring the boundary between indoor luxury and outdoor nature. Torajiro Asakura personally selected premier ancient cedar and cypress timber from the Yoshino mountains of Nara, ensuring that the natural wood grain and silky surface texture remained unblemished throughout the residence.

Step out into the stunning kaiyushiki stroll garden that cascades down the steep southern slope of the Meguro bluff. Winding stone paths, historic stone lanterns, and moss-covered basalt boulders meander beneath centuries-old Japanese maples and weeping cherries, creating an oasis of profound peace in the center of modern Tokyo. Cascading down the natural embankment, the stroll garden utilizes native volcanic stones and weeping maples to create dramatic seasonal contrasts between delicate spring cherry blossoms and blazing autumn foliage.

Look at the cedar rain shutters, or amado: every evening during the Taisho era, servants slid dozens of solid wooden shutters around the entire perimeter of the house into compact storage boxes using a single concealed wooden corner track. On the upper floor sits an elegant Western-style reception chamber furnished with period velvet armchairs and historic patterned carpets, where Asakura once entertained foreign diplomatic delegations and government ministers.

Walk south along the tree-lined Kyu-Yamate-dori avenue into the modernist white pavilions of Hillside Terrace.