Japan House
Coordinates: 40°05′34″N 88°13′04″W / 40.0928°N 88.2179°W
Japan House is a learning facility founded in 1976 by Shozo Sato. It is part of the College of Fine and Applied Arts, at at the University of Illinois at Urbana–Champaign. The facility includes three tea rooms, or Chashitsu, a tea garden (Roji) and Japanese rock garden. It currently conducts classes in Japanese tea ceremony, Japanese Aesthetics and Ikebana for university students and members of the community.
Japanese artist Shozo Sato arrived at Krannert Center for the Performing Arts as an artist-in-residence in 1964, and began teaching tea ceremony. He struggled to find the right setting for the classes, sometimes even teaching them from his own home. Eventually, after several years, Morton Weir, then Vice Chancellor for Academic Affairs, now Chancellor Emeritus, heard of the rising popularity of these tea ceremonies. He arranged for Professor Sato to be able to use an old Victorian house on campus, at Lincoln Avenue and California (now the site of the Alice B. Campbell Alumni Center).
In the early 1990s Professor Sato retired, leaving the community, and the old Victorian was torn down for redevelopment. Professor Kimiko Gunji, a longtime teaching assistant of Professor Sato. She approached her tea school in Japan, the Urasenke Foundation of Tea, and they agreed to donate two tearooms for a new Japan House. With that commitment in hand, Professor Gunji and then Associate Provost Roger Martin moved ahead, receiving commitments for $100,000 from the Japan Illini Club, the Commemorative Association for the Japan World Exposition and the Japan Foundation Center for Global Partnership.
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