Hasso-an

This guide to Hasso-an in Sapporo's Nakajima Park opens in March 2005, when a winter shelter buckled under heavy snow and came down on the three-hundred-year-old tea house, snapping its central support post into three pieces. It traces the building's much longer journey before that day, from its attribution to the tea master Kobori Enshu and its start inside Komuro Castle, through the Sapporo businessman who shipped it north in 1919 and the city that later set it beside this garden pond. You'll hear what the tea house's eight windows and openings were each cut to frame. Look for the mix of latticed frames, bare earthen walls and a single sliding panel as you walk around it.