Sasaya Hotel (Honen-mushi)

HHonen-mushi is the annexe of Sasaya Hotel in Chikuma, Nagano, designed by Arata Endo and, according to the hotel, completed in 1934. We read how a pupil of Frank Lloyd Wright arranged a tatami room, a veranda one step lower, and a garden.

A Chair, One Step Down

On the veranda there are two chairs with a table between them. As the hotel’s architecture page describes it, the floor is about 7 sun (21 cm) below the tatami room, so a seated guest is at the same eye level as someone in the room.

The place is Sasaya Hotel, in the Togura-Kamiyamada hot-spring town of Chikuma, Nagano Prefecture. West of the main building stands an annexe, Honen-mushi, a nationally registered Tangible Cultural Property, listed as “Sasaya Hotel Bessō” (the hotel’s villa). The Agency for Cultural Affairs’ commentary calls it a group of guest rooms linked by covered corridors. The designer is Arata Endo. It goes on to say that the layout of each room, from the tatami room through a veranda set one step lower, with chairs, out to the garden, shows Endo’s hand. This arrangement, it adds, is said to have strongly influenced later inns built for international tourists. The word “hand” stands out; it reads less as the name of a style than as one architect’s signature.

The sentence is short, but it has an order. There is the tatami room; one step down, the veranda; beyond it, the garden. Those three make the axis for reading Honen-mushi. The order seems to follow the direction of walking: the further in you go, the closer you seem to come to an open place from a closed one.

The veranda has only one step. Which rooms it applies to, the architecture page does not say. But that step changes the height of the floor, the posture of the sitter and the direction of the eyes. The eyes of someone sitting on tatami and of someone sitting on a chair are at different heights to begin with. Lower the veranda floor, and the difference narrows.

According to the room guide, Ayame has an especially wide veranda with an outer ledge, overlooking a pond of koi carp. The guide does not say whether it has a step or chairs.

Endo was an architect who studied under Frank Lloyd Wright. A pupil of a Western architect built a veranda for chairs, one step down, into a Japanese hot-spring inn. What did Wright’s pupil bring to the inn? That is the question of this article. We look for the answer in three places: the room that locks, the garden with its pond, and the work of Arata Endo himself.

A Room That Locks

Every room in Honen-mushi has its own lockable entrance and its own walls. The hotel describes this as Endo making the idea of a “private room” explicit, and explains that it was novel at the time and went on to become a model for modern tourist inns.

The entrance of each room locks. Beyond the veranda lies the garden. A mechanism that closes inwards and one that opens outwards sit side by side in a single room.

Three parts make a room into a lockable private room: an entrance, a wall and a key. Each is small. Together they settle, clearly, who may enter the room.

Sasaya Hotel began in September 1903, when Ryonosuke Sakai opened the “Seiryokan Sasaya Hotel” on the right bank of the Chikuma River. In 1916 it moved to its present site, in step with the relocation of the third Togura hot spring. Close to thirty years after the opening, an annexe with locks and walls was to join an inn that had already been running on that ground.

The villa belongs to the Showa era. According to the hotel’s chronology, Shuichi Sakai left banking in 1931 to run the hotel in earnest. A year or so later he asked Endo to design a sukiya-style villa and a middle hall. Expansion works to enlarge the business began in the same year. The architecture page says the villa (now Honen-mushi) was completed in Showa 9.

The building’s date is registered as “early Showa / 1932”. Taken with the hotel’s account, 1932 is the year work began and Showa 9 the year it was finished. This article writes 1932 for the commission and start of work, and 1934 for completion.

What was registered is a timber building of two storeys, partly single-storey, with a tiled roof. The structure field says “timber” and the word sukiya does not appear; sukiya-style is the hotel’s term. This article therefore writes it this way: timber in structure, sukiya-style in manner.

The rooms in the annexe are not all alike. Ran has two spaces, an anteroom and a main room, with a wide alcove. Ume has a bedroom that the room guide gives as the only one in Honen-mushi. Kikyo is known for a large bath beside a small courtyard garden. The way of closing is shared, while the view changes from room to room. If the tatami room, veranda and garden are the axis, Ran, Ume and Kikyo look like variations that add an anteroom, a bedroom and a courtyard garden.

Honen-mushi is a separate annexe, joined to the main building by the lobby and a stone corridor. Called a “group of guest rooms”, it looks less like one large block than a row in which each wing can turn a face to the garden.

The Garden, the Pond and the Name

In the room called Kiku, part of the veranda stands over the pond. The pond lies to the west and north. Hagi looks south, and Satsuki west, over a garden with a pond.

The garden was the work of the landscape designer Abe (阿部貞著), whom the hotel describes as Endo’s classmate and a fellow native of the same region. He studied agriculture at Tokyo Imperial University, and the title of his 1917 graduation thesis was “Water Courses, Ponds and Waterfalls in the Japanese Garden”. Running water, ponds, waterfalls: judging by that title, the pond was one of the themes of Abe’s gardens. The registered sentence, which writes tatami room, veranda and garden as one run, seems to treat the garden as part of the room, not as a backdrop.

The ponds, though, need to be told apart. In the courtyard in front of the lobby there is a pond with koi. A column published by the hotel says that a square pond visible from the lobby lies between the Manshokaku wing and Honen-mushi. The pond was made in 1964, the column adds, and laid out by Abe. That is a pond some thirty years younger than the villa.

Whether the pond seen from the rooms and the pond in the column are the same cannot be told from the published material. That a pond can be seen is stated for several rooms. The koi in the courtyard belong to the hotel’s garden, not to the annexe.

Baths divide in the same way, between annexe and main building. The public bath Ishi-no-yu (“stone bath”) is on the first floor of the main building and is known for two stone tubs, one large and one small. The stone open-air bath looks onto the garden. On the second floor is Ki-no-yu (“wooden bath”). In the hotel’s own words, both use its own source water, 100 per cent, flowing freely. The magazine Precious (October 2022) writes that Honen-mushi guests can also use the main building’s public baths.

If your room has chairs on the veranda, swap seats with your companion and look at each other from room and veranda in turn. Whether your eyes meet at the same height is something only the person sitting can tell. After dark, the same step reads from the other side.

Lastly, the name. “Villa” names a use; “Honen-mushi” borrows a story. “Honen-mushi” was not the building’s original name. It replaced “villa” when the building was registered in 2003, and comes from Naoya Shiga’s short story “Honen-mushi”. The hotel says Shiga wrote it in 1927 while staying at Sasaya Hotel. The honen-mushi is the mayfly, and the old saying holds that a year with many of them brings a good harvest.

If the hotel’s account is right, 1927 is five years before work on the villa began, and Shiga stayed in a Sasaya Hotel that did not yet have the villa. The building later borrowed the title of the story.

Arata Endo and the Form of the Inn

The Koshien Hotel dates from 1930. The ground on its west side is about 1,500 mm lower. A paper by Tomoko Kuroda (Design Theory, no. 67, 2016) says that Endo took it as his mission to absorb not only Wright’s forms but his ideas and methods as a whole and put them into practice. The lower ground, it adds, was turned into differences in height in the stairs and floors on the west side. Copy only the form, and the conditions of the site are a nuisance; take the thinking, and even low ground seems to become material for design.

That is another building, but it can be read alongside the step at Sasaya. Turn a difference in ground level into a step inside the room. Using floor height to give each part of a room its character: the two buildings seem to share the same hand. The gesture is close to the single step down from room to veranda. We have found no source that says the step at Sasaya came from the same thought.

Endo was born in 1889 and died in 1951. He came from Fukushima. He graduated in architecture from Tokyo Imperial University and went to the United States to study under Wright. He served as Wright’s chief assistant and supervised the design of the Imperial Hotel. In 1922 he set up the Arata Endo Architectural Studio and, after becoming independent, designed buildings including Jiyu Gakuen and the Koshien Hotel. A man who had designed hotels was now thinking about the rooms of an inn. The hotel’s profile says Endo advocated “architecture thoroughly of life”.

Architecture thoroughly of life. – A phrase the Sasaya Hotel website gives as Endo’s position

The outside stayed in a sukiya-like Japanese manner; what changed was inside the room. Rooms divided by lock and wall, and a tatami room with a veranda one step lower. What Wright’s pupil brought to the inn looks less like a style than a way of placing heights and partitions. What shapes the form of an inn may be less the roofline or the decoration than the order in which a guest moves from entering the room to reaching the garden: use the key, step down, sit.

The influence has been described in large words. No source we have found traces which inns took it up, or how.

What can be tested is a lock on the entrance and, in a room whose veranda has a step and chairs, the height of the veranda. A guest can try both with hand and foot. Any meaning beyond that belongs to whoever has moved between the tatami room and the veranda.

Three things to see here

「Architecture thoroughly of life.」

A phrase the Sasaya Hotel website gives as Endo’s position (whether it is his own wording is unconfirmed)

Staying here