Enoura Observatory: Hiroshi Sugimoto’s Stage for the Solstice
On a former citrus grove above Sagami Bay, the photographer Hiroshi Sugimoto has built a gallery, a tunnel and two stages aligned with the sunrise at the solstices. It lies south-west of Tokyo and admits visitors by reservation.
The Enoura Observatory opened in October 2017 at Enoura, a district of Odawara in Kanagawa prefecture, on the coast south-west of Tokyo. It is the work of Hiroshi Sugimoto, known for his long-exposure photographs of seas and cinema screens, who has also practised architecture since founding his own design office in 2008. The site belongs to the Odawara Art Foundation, which he set up in 2009 to promote Japanese art and performance.
The foundation describes the place as an attempt to return to the origins of art: to the moment when people first marked the turning points of the year by watching where the sun rose. It is neither a museum nor a garden, though it contains both.
The site
The observatory covers about 60,000 square metres of steep hillside that was once planted with mandarin oranges, between the mountains of Hakone and the sea. From the upper terraces the view runs across Sagami Bay to the Boso Peninsula and the island of Oshima.
The buildings are few and are placed by the sun rather than by convenience. The foundation lists a gallery, stages, a tea house, a restored gate of the Muromachi period, a strolling garden and offices.
The lines of the sun
The principal structure is a gallery 100 metres long, a narrow room of glass and stone, which projects from the hillside and ends in mid-air above the slope. Its axis points at the place on the horizon where the sun rises on the morning of the summer solstice. Sugimoto’s seascape photographs hang along the wall.
Beneath it runs a tunnel of weathering steel. It is aligned with sunrise on the winter solstice. On that morning the light travels the length of the tunnel and falls on a stone at the far end. Beside the tunnel’s mouth is a stage of optical glass, raised on a timber frame in the technique used for the veranda of Kiyomizu temple in Kyoto, so that performers seem to stand above the sea. A second stage, of stone, has the proportions of a Noh stage.
Old stones
Sugimoto is a collector as well as an artist, and the paths between the structures are set with fragments he has gathered from across Japan: old temple column bases, carved stonework and large boulders. They are placed as in a traditional garden, to be come upon. A lower area, five to ten minutes’ walk down the hill through a bamboo grove, has further works, including one of the artist’s Mathematical Model installations and a shed of fossils.
For travellers
Visits are by advance reservation, in two sessions a day, one in the morning and one in the afternoon, with additional evening sessions on some summer days. The observatory is closed on Tuesdays and Wednesdays and over the New Year, with occasional temporary closures, so check the foundation’s website before travelling. Visitors must be twelve or older. Allow one and a half to two hours. The ground is uneven and steep in places, and there is little shelter in rain.
The nearest station is Nebukawa, on the JR Tokaido main line, eight minutes beyond Odawara; a free shuttle bus runs from the station at set times matched to the sessions. Odawara is under an hour from Tokyo by shinkansen. The observatory combines well with a night in Hakone, where Hotel The Mitsui Hakone is scheduled to open in December 2026, or it can be done as a day trip from Tokyo. For another building made for stillness, see Yoshio Taniguchi’s D.T. Suzuki Museum in Kanazawa.