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The Restoration of Yanagisawa House (Built in 1951-52, Ohara, Setagaya Ward, Tokyo) and Promotion of Historical Associations with Tea
Get PDFThe original Yanagisawa House has been partly preserved as a registered tangible cultural property and the rest was rebuilt in the early Heisei period. The author has written previously about the house, and this paper supplies further information about the original form of the house and of a project which has made use of the house. The results of an investigation and interviews with related persons are as follows.
The layout of the original house was a compromise between Japanese and European style. A western-style room （drawing room） was constructed by the front door. The house had a middle corridor. There were rooms equipped with a water supply on the north side of the corridor, and 3 rooms were distributed on the south side.
There was a hearth in the Japanese-style room next to the drawing room and there was a door in the center of the middle corridor. The drawing room and the Japanese-style room on the east side of the house were used for service, and the rooms on the west side were for family.
Though the rooms on the west side of the house were demolished during reconstruction, this lost section seems to have been built with no particular design. The designer of this house, Yasubee Ito, tried to foreground a feature of a traditional private house by leaving the structural materials exposed: the logs which appear under the ceiling of the drawing room remain visible.
The extant part of the old house is open to the public during Tokyo Heritage Weeks. And various events are performed in the other house at the same site while the project of tea-processing is held in the tract of green land formed by the garden of the Yanagisawa house. Though the tea industry in Setagaya declined after about 1900, tea cultivation was popular in what was then Daita village and in Shimokitazawa, and the Yanagisawa family were at one time engaged in the trade. The events at Yanagisawa house aiming at the reproduction of the past will motivate people to revive the house as an important local historical property. Yanagisawa house, in cooperation with Saita Memorial Hall （established for the purpose of promoting tea culture） and shops in the Shimokitazawa area, will be a good base for this campaign.departmental bulletin pape
The Relics of Ashihei Hino and Junkichi Mukai as War Correspondents
Get PDFThe author traces the work and collaboration of the novelist Ashihei Hino （1907-1960） and the painter Junkichi Mukai （1901-1995）, who were war correspondents during the Great East Asian War. They first met in 1939. In 1938 Hino, having been awarded the Akutagawa Prize while serving with his regiment in Hangzhou, got promoted to the press corps. He wrote about the battle of Xuzhou in Wheat and Soldier and with that book became a best-selling writer. Mukai’s career was launched during the two years he spent studying in France. He was awarded the Chogyu Prize in 1933 for 11 works he completed in Europe. Mukai enlisted as a volunteer painter in China in 1937, and, the same year Hino was called up for military service in China. Later they served together in the Philippines in 1942, and on the Burma-India front in 1944. Although they were often face to face with death, they wielded their pen and brush to convey both wartime and peacetime situations. The realism that characterizes their work remains as compelling and informative today as it was when the work was created.
From 1948 to 1950 Hino was criticized for his involvement with the military during wartime and was purged. He came back as a popular writer, but often returned to the War in his writings. He committed suicide at the age of 52. After the war Mukai was active doing illustrations and oil paintings of old Japanese farmhouses until his death in Setagaya at the age of 93.
As war correspondents they met a variety of foreign people: enemies, friends, prisoners of war, spies, and civilians. In Hino and Mukai’s work we can see that the War forced Japanese of all walks of life to open their eyes to the world outside Japan. Indeed their work seems more effective in doing this than works created in our globalized era. During the war, war paintings were welcomed with great enthusiasm and the technique of many oil painters reached its peak. Hino and Mukai together had a chemistry that allowed them to create works that observe and preserve the past.departmental bulletin pape
Musashi Province as Described in the Manyoshu: Poetry Composed by People in Eastern Japan (Azumauta), and Poetry by Coastal Guards, and Their Wives (Sakimorinouta)
Get PDFIn the ancient Nara period, present day Setagaya-ward, Tokyo, was part of Musashi province. The author reviews its historical background using work done by previous researchers, and considers surviving ancient relics in today’s Setagaya. The county name Seta appears in the Wamyoruijusho (Japan’s oldest dictionary of Chinese characters edited in the Heian period). In addition, there is evidence in the Nihon Shoki (Chronicles of Japan compiled in the Nara period) and in the Shoku Nihongi (Second of the six classical Japanese history texts in the Heian period) that nearly 1,800 Korean people, including a few nuns and priests from areas then called Kudara, Shiragi and Kokuri, naturalized in Musashi. Though the distribution is not certain, we can surmise that those people played a role in the development of the culture of Eastern Japan. In the Azumauta, collected in Musashi province, the rhetorical technique called jokotoba is prevalent. The preface words, or jokotoba, in eight of the nine poems begin with place names. This suggests that the poetry is inextricably related to the natural features or scenes of the province. In two Musashi poems in the Manyoshu the flower ukera (Atractylodes japonica) appears. The uncontrollable emotion of love is symbolized by this plain edible plant that was used as a medical herb at the time. The exclusive characteristic of Sakimorinouta in Musashi province is that they include elegies by the wives of coastal guards. Six out of the twelve poems are of this type. In the poetry of the region, the dialects of the east are recorded. For example in a poem by a husband in Ebara-county, “house” is transcribed ihe while in a poem by a wife it is iha. The distribution of dialects in the Manyoshu suggests that there was a phonetical borderline between the west and east in Musashi province during this period. Thus the regional characteristics and place names are historically inherited.departmental bulletin pape
