Keiunkan Historic Guesthouse & Garden
Keiunkan, located about five minutes’ walk south of Nagahama Station, is a guesthouse with a Japanese garden designed by one of Japan’s preeminent landscape architects. The guesthouse was built to host Emperor Meiji (1852–1912) and his wife, Empress Shōken (1849–1914), who stopped briefly in Nagahama in 1887. A pair of armchairs upholstered in white cloth, on which the emperor and empress sat during their visit, is preserved in an upper room.
Keiunkan was constructed in just under four months and is said to have been completed on the morning of the emperor’s arrival. Construction of the guesthouse was personally funded by Asami Matazō (1839–1900), a prominent Nagahama industrialist involved in textiles, transport, and banking.
The garden’s features include a dry pond, a teahouse, and a collection of distinctive stones and stone lanterns. The garden was created in 1912 by Ogawa Jihei VII (1860–1933), a landscape architect known for his work on several notable gardens, including the grounds at Heian Jingū Shrine in Kyoto.
Since 1952, Keiunkan has hosted an annual plum bonsai exhibition between early January and early March. Trees as old as 400 years feature in this exhibition, which attracts tens of thousands of visitors each year.