Today I visited Youkokan, the second house of Fukui’s Matsudaira clan in feudal Japan. Second house! It was absolutely, breathtakingly beautiful! The current house was rebuilt in the 1980′s (the original was destroyed in the firebombs on WW2), but sadly parts the grounds have been built over with roads. However, what’s been rebuilt is just insanely awesome. It’s a garden the size of a small city block, with tiny streams and waterfalls and bridges all over the place (originally it was fed by the same waterways that fed Fukui castle’s moat, but as those have been built-over, now it is fed by pumps. One of the buildings hasn’t been rebuilt, as a road runs through it, but the foundations are marked. The rest of the grounds are a beautiful Japanese garden surrounding a shallow lake filled with carp. The house itself is built half on land and half over the lake… When you go inside, you can stick your head out the window and be right over the water… the balconies go over the water as well. And it has a wooden walkway that goes around the outside of the house, but is still under the roof, so your socks don’t get dirty or wet if it’s raining and you step outside. There was a cedar steam room built over a canal that runs underneath the house and into a private courtyard surrounded by a low wall… kind of like a backyard pool. It feels like a miniature Japanese castle, and even though it was really dang cold walking around there in socks… wow! It was just breathtaking. Continue reading →