Hyakudan Kaidan Special Opening

Hyakudan Kaidan is a wooden building of 1935 in Meguro, Tokyo, and a Tangible Cultural Property designated by the Tokyo Metropolitan Government. It is normally opened only for exhibitions, with its rooms given over to whatever is on show. For six months from the autumn of 2026 it is opened with almost nothing in it, so that the building itself is what there is to see. It has not been open for about a year.

The building

A single straight flight of stairs runs indoors up a slope that falls sixteen metres, joining four wooden structures into one building. It has ninety-nine steps, even though Hyakudan Kaidan translates as the staircase of a hundred.

Seven rooms stand along it. They were the banqueting rooms of the Meguro Gajoen, which opened in 1931 serving Beijing and Japanese food, and which set out to open the ryotei, a kind of restaurant until then kept for a few, to ordinary people. The decoration was part of that. Between them the rooms hold 126 Japanese paintings by leading painters of the early Showa years, mother-of-pearl set into black lacquer, latticed screens fitted together without nails or glue, and more than 750 pieces of cloisonne enamel in the ceilings. The Gajoen of those years was called the Ryugujo of the Showa era, after the palace of the dragon king at the bottom of the sea, where the fisherman Urashima Taro is taken in the old story and finds everything about him made of treasure.

Most of the Gajoen came down in 1988, when the Meguro River was reworked and the site redeveloped. This building was kept as it stood, and was designated in March 2009.

The rooms

Each room is named for its decoration, most of them after the painter who did the walls and ceiling. Twenty-three mirrored panels in the ceiling of the Jippo no Ma hold birds and flowers of the four seasons by Araki Jippo, and mother-of-pearl runs through the black lacquer below them.

The Gyosho no Ma is finished throughout in gold leaf and gold dust. Its two alcove posts are cypress trunks carved with a scene from a Chinese dialogue between a fisherman and a woodcutter, which is where the name of the room comes from.

The Kiyokata no Ma is quieter, built in the manner of a tea room by Kaburagi Kiyokata, a painter known for his pictures of women, who painted the flowers and the figures in it himself.

What is shown

The rooms are left as close to empty as they can be, so that the paintings, the carving and the joinery are what there is to look at.

One object is brought in. A round dining table inlaid with mother-of-pearl, made before the war and since restored, is held to be the oldest revolving table still in existence. It is set in the Jippo no Ma, whose own decoration is mother-of-pearl, and the two have not been shown together before.

The other addition is a guide to a hundred of the motifs worked into the building. Many of the designs carry a wish in them, for health, for wealth, for a good match, and the hundred are picked out on that theme.