Murin-an

The villa’s elegant interior opens onto a serene garden that uses water, stones, and pruned maples to create visual depth. Sitting on the veranda with matcha, the boundary between the garden and the distant mountains dissolves — this is what Japanese garden aesthetics aspired to achieve. Ogawa’s design principle of integration with the landscape rather than domination over it remains palpable. The site is small but densely meaningful.

Murin-an was built as the private retreat of Yamagata Aritomo, one of the most powerful political figures of the Meiji era and a twice-serving Prime Minister. The garden was designed and completed in 1896 by Ogawa Jihei VII, who is responsible for some of the finest Meiji-era gardens in Kyoto — including those at the Heian Shrine and the Kyoto Botanical Garden. Ogawa’s signature approach used natural-looking streams fed by the Lake Biwa Canal, low ground cover plantings, and open lawn areas — a significant break from the densely planted compositions of earlier Japanese garden traditions.

The Villa Conference Room on the second floor of the main building is historically significant: it was the site of a 1903 meeting between Yamagata, Ito Hirobumi, and other Meiji leaders that set Japanese foreign policy ahead of the Russo-Japanese War. The room has been preserved essentially as it was then. The combination of garden design mastery and political history in a single small villa is rare.

The shakkei technique at work here is particularly pure: the garden has no boundary wall on its east side, so the eye passes without interruption from the foreground stream and lawn through the middle-ground trees to the Higashiyama ridge behind — the mountains become part of the composition. Open 9:00–17:00 (last entry 16:30); closed Monday; admission ¥600 including matcha on the veranda. A 5-minute walk from Keage Station on the Tozai Subway Line.