Kiunkaku: The Architecture of Quietude

A few steps from Atami’s summer crowds, the gate of Kiunkaku shuts out the noise of the town.

The villa was built in 1919 for the businessman and politician Uchida Shinya. In 1925 it passed to Nezu Kaichirō, head of Tobu Railway, who added the Western-style wing that gives the house its double character. After the war it became a ryokan, and for decades writers came to stay and work, among them Shiga Naoya, Tanizaki Jun’ichirō and Dazai Osamu. Today it belongs to the city of Atami.

Walking through it, you cross between two worlds without warning. A tatami room with paper screens opens onto a salon of carved wood and coloured glass, and a bath is laid in patterned tile. It is a house of the Taishō and early Shōwa years, when wealthy households were testing how Western rooms might sit beside their own, and the rooms still seem to be working it out.

I photographed it in the summer of 2025: light moving across textured walls, rooms turned toward the garden, the craft in a wooden joint, and old panes of glass that bend the view behind them.