Tsuruichi Yakiniku is a very popular Japanese Yakinikum restaurant famous for its wonderful beef barbecue. It is located in Tsuruichi area, east of Osaka, where many Korean families live among the local Japanese households, and therefore, it sees a unique and diverse culture there. Tsuruichi, in Japanese, means “the top one in Tsuruichi area”, and actually, it is the first Yakinikum restaurant in this area in the recent hundred years. 

We used strip-type partition board in this project, because it is always used in Japanese architecture. And in fact, the use of numerous close-grained stripes, to some extent, satisfied the aesthetics of the Japanese people, because we found an interesting way of drawing rains in Ukiyo-e (a famous Japanese painting collection) when we were finding materials and inspiration for the design: the drawer Utagawa Hiroshige used dense strips to paint the pouring rains in Summer in the picture named Sudden Rain Falling on the Bridge of his Hundred Beautiful Sceneries in Edo Era collection. The sudden change of weather and the instant reactions of pedestrians were captured by the drawer and showed in the pictures, making a great painting collection and even attracting Vincent van Gogh’s attention and therefore, the picture collection became wellknown in the world. This way of painting rain is unique also because you can neither see it in the Western paintings nor in Chinese ink paintings. 

In the design, the restaurant echoes the crowded streets and dense buildings: the two entrances are at the gable walls, and when you are inside the restaurant, the tri-angle slope crest immediately comes to your sight. Also, we intentionally lower the eaves in order to use the tri-angle roof to indicate the relationship between Japanese architecture and the hill of woods. In Japanese architecture circle, if the entrance is in the gable wall, it is called “tsuma iri”, otherwise, if the entrance is under the eave, it’s called “hira iri”. The eave of this restaurant is only 2.1 meters, which is very low even for a residential building, let alone this is a restaurant, a public building. So we were claimed by the Developer that we have no common sense of architecture, and the customers are able to touch the roof as long as they stretch their arms. But we explained to them that we made the eave so low is because we want to make the walls hided by the eaves and their shades, in this way, the tri-angle roof can be stood out and therefore make the restaurant look like a small hill among the modern buildings in the city.