Shōkadō Garden and Museum

The garden can be visited, the hermitage cannot: closed for works, with no reopening date.

You buy the ticket for the outer garden and walk among more than forty varieties of bamboo and over three hundred camellias, with three tea houses along the path. The inner enclosure, where the monk-painter's hermitage and his studio stand, remains closed off by the works. Next door, the municipal museum changes its exhibition, and with each change the ticket price changes too.

A city garden of about 20,000 square metres built around the hermitage of Shōjō, a seventeenth-century monk and painter, priest of the nearby Iwashimizu Hachimangū shrine and one of the ‘three brushes of the Kan'ei era’, that is, the three most celebrated calligraphers of early seventeenth-century Japan. The four-compartment lacquered box he used as a drawing case gave its shape, three centuries later, to the shōkadō bentō, the meal box divided into four. Next to the garden is a municipal museum with rotating exhibitions.

ℹ️ ⚠️ The inner garden, with the Shōkadō hermitage and the Izumibō-shoin study, cannot be visited because of earthquake damage and the restoration work, except on rare special opening days: what you buy is the outer garden and the museum, not the house. ⚠️ The reopening date has been searched for and is not stated. Open 9:00–17:00 with last entry at 16:30, closed on Mondays (the first following weekday if the Monday is a public holiday) and from 27 December to 4 January. Garden ¥300 for adults; the museum starts from ¥400 and the price changes with the exhibition, dropping to ¥100 in periods when there is none. Wheelchairs are available on loan. By bus from the Keihan stations of Iwashimizu-Hachimangū or Kuzuha, bus stop 大芝・松花堂前.

🚉 大芝・松花堂前 · 1 min walk

Sources: shokado-garden-art-museum.jp

All series · Open the map