House of Conundrum

The secret, suburban life of Fairmount Park's Japanese house.

by Bruce Schimmel

Whenever my dentist is excavating, this is where I escape. I imagine sitting on its wide wooden veranda, under a thick bark roof, cradled by massive beams of cypress. The scent of straw from tatami mats in the great room mingles with the musk that rises off the pond. It is nearly silent, other than chirping birds and dripping water and the occasional whine of a high-speed dental drill. (Ouch!)

A fine place to temporarily send your mind, the real Japan House is located just 20 minutes from Billy Penn, on the grounds of the Horticultural Center in Fairmount Park. Its formal name is Shofuso — meaning Pine Breeze Villa. The main building is loosely modeled on a "shoin-zukuri," a samurai warrior's study and reception hall, whose 17th-century original still stands near Kyoto, Japan.

It's a place of perfect repose, where I can imagine being transported back four centuries, and half a world away. So when I interviewed the world's foremost authority on Shofuso recently in Tokyo, I was stunned to discover that the Japan House's ancient allure was actually a very modern creation used to inspire postwar American suburbia.

"Many people think that Shofuso is a copy of a 17th-century edifice in Kyoto. That's not the fact," says Hiroyasu Fujioka, professor of architectural history at Tokyo Institute of Technology. According to Fujioka, Philadelphia's Shofuso is really a "modern masterpiece" of Junzo Yoshimura (1908-1997), a leading Japanese post-WWII architect. Originally built in Japan in 1953, Shofuso was disassembled and rebuilt in the garden of the Museum of Modern Art (MoMA) in New York. It was the third exhibit in a three-part series on modern domestic architecture, complementing works by Marcel Breuer and Gregory Ain. Shofuso stayed on display for two years, before being installed in Philadelphia in 1958.

"After the Second World War," says Fujioka, "there was a boom for housing around American cities."

As the suburbs sprouted, consumers were hungry for models of beautiful architecture. But in Shofuso, Fujika says, Americans got only what they thought was an "authentic, traditional Japanese house," which many then took as a model for a "moderately-priced home [to express] the ideals of a suburban nuclear American family."

Yoshimura's illusion clearly struck a chord. The Japanese house was easily the most popular of the three showcase homes, drawing twice the crowds of the others. Even by contemporary museum standards, this was a blockbuster. By the time it was dismantled in 1955, close to a quarter-million visitors had taken off their shoes to feel its wood floors and tatami mats, and to gaze out at an artifical pond replete with imported stones covered with imported moss. Shofuso was used as a backdrop in fashion spreads for Vogue and Harper's Bazaaar, and was showcased in coast-to-coast broadcasts on the NBC, CBS, and now-defunct DuMont networks.

Louis Mumford the famed, grumpy New Yorker architecture critic extolled the modernity of this ancient model. Here was a one-story bungalow using an open-plan interior, with a multi-purpose "great room." It was based on modular construction, finished with the natural wood and stone, and brought the outdoors inside, through the interplay of interior space with the surrounding garden.

"The Japanese House," crowed Mumford, "demonstrates that purity and simplicity are the aesthetic flowers of a life that is conceived, from first to last, in these elemental terms. Just as you must take off your outdoor shoes before you enter such a house, you must eliminate many other incongruous habits, including a fondness for gadgets."

Nice rhetoric. But even as Americans rushed to embrace what they imagined was an authentic Japanese model, the Japanese at home adopted American ways. Says Fujioka, "after the war, many Japanese thought that being traditional was an evil thing. They lost confidence in their traditions. There was a trend called "Americanization.' Everything was to be American."

According to June Washikata O'Neill, a board member of the Friends of the Japan House, Shofuso was a kind of peace-offering from a defeated nation to please its conquerors, "You could have blasted us off the face of the earth, and you let us live."

"My dad was in charge of telling people what to do," says O'Neill, whose Texan father served in Japan after the war and married a Japanese woman. "The Japanese didn't fart without talking to the Americans first."

For some Japanese, says O'Neill, the gift of Shofuso "was like our Statue of Liberty." Which is why, even now, there is a friends of Philadelphia's Shofuso in Japan, because "they have an obligation from keeping it from turning into dust."

Thought not widely known in Philadelphia, Shofuso is not likely to suffer such a fate. When the house needed help from the Japanese for a major refurbishment in 1975, then-Mayor Frank Rizzo promised that the city would help maintain the property in perpetuity — and so far, so good. Perhaps certain traditions really are eternal.