Izura Rokkakudo

A visit to Izura Rokkakudo is easy to underplan — bring more time, and less certainty about what you'll find, than you'd expect.

Okakura Tenshin wrote The Book of Tea, ran the Tokyo School of Fine Arts, curated Asian art in Boston, and argued that Asia was one civilisation. In 1905 he built himself a small vermilion hexagonal hut on a rock ledge directly above the Pacific at Izura, on the northern Ibaraki coast, and used it to think in. He also moved the Japan Art Institute out here, which briefly made this stretch of cliff the centre of modern Japanese painting.

The building is tiny and sits so close to the water that spray reaches it. The 2011 tsunami destroyed it entirely; it was rebuilt to the original design and reopened in 2012. It is now managed by Ibaraki University, and you buy a ticket, walk down through pine and out onto the ledge. Whether the hut is beautiful is debatable; that Okakura chose this specific spot to sit and look at the ocean is not.

Okakura's argument for a shared Asian civilisation, most famously distilled into the line 'Asia is one,' put him at odds with the wave of Western-modeled reform sweeping Japanese art institutions in his lifetime, and his eventual break from the Tokyo School of Fine Arts he had helped build was as much a philosophical rupture as a career move. Relocating the Japan Art Institute to this remote stretch of coast, far from Tokyo's art establishment, let him and the group of painters who followed him work outside institutional pressure, developing the styles that would later influence figures like Yokoyama Taikan largely in isolation from the capital's debates. The hexagonal hut's design is often read as reflecting his interest in Chinese and broader Asian aesthetics rather than a purely Japanese architectural vocabulary, consistent with his belief that Japan's artistic role was to synthesize regional traditions rather than simply modernize along Western lines.