Former Aichi Prefectural Handa Middle School Martial Arts Hall (Nanachu Memorial Hall)

A Nickname That Outlived the Name

The Former Aichi Prefectural Handa Middle School Martial Arts Hall (Nanachu Memorial Hall) is a 1924 training hall standing on the campus of Aichi Prefectural Handa Senior High School in Deguchicho, Handa City, Aichi Prefecture, registered as a national Registered Tangible Cultural Property (登録有形文化財) on 29 June 2022. It is a single-storey reinforced concrete building of 275 square metres, registered as one structure.

Nanachu means seventh middle school, and the name comes from the school's original title. The school's own chronology records that Aichi Prefectural Seventh Middle School was authorised in 1918 and opened in 1919, borrowing rooms in a local elementary school until its own campus was ready. It moved to the present site in 1920 and was renamed Aichi Handa Middle School in 1922. The campus buildings were formally completed in 1924, the year the martial arts hall went up.

So by the time the hall existed, the seventh had already become Handa, which is why the heritage listing calls it the Handa Middle School Martial Arts Hall. The alumni never let go of the older name. When the postwar reforms turned the institution into Aichi Prefectural Handa Senior High School in 1948, this one building kept being called the Nanachu Memorial Hall, and it still is.

The First Building, After Thirteen Sets of Gateposts

The Nanachu Memorial Hall was added to the Registered Tangible Cultural Property list under the criterion for a design that has served as a model. Its registration number is 23-0578, from the 102nd round of listings.

Handa Senior High School describes the building as the oldest surviving reinforced concrete martial arts hall built for a prewar middle school anywhere in Aichi. Prefectural school construction shifted from timber to reinforced concrete across the late 1920s, and this hall belongs to the very start of that change.

The listing also marked a threshold in the paperwork. Thirteen sets of gateposts and similar minor structures at Aichi prefectural high schools had already been registered, but no actual building had. The 2022 round changed that: the Nanachu Memorial Hall and the Kankidō assembly hall at Zuiryō High School in Nagoya became the first two buildings on prefectural high school land to be listed.

A prefectural survey in 2015 found only seven prewar buildings still standing on the campuses of Aichi's prefectural high schools. The Handa hall is one of the seven.

A Clipped Roof and What Was Hiding Above the Ceiling

The roof is a clipped gable, hankirizuma-zukuri, finished in Sangawara-buki. Take a gable roof, cut off the apex at each end and lay that portion back as a hip, and you get a ridge line that steps down twice before it reaches the wall. A Kirizuma-zukuri porch projects from the west front, and a door opens on the east side, facing the sports ground.

The detailing belongs to the Secession, the Viennese line of design that Japanese practice absorbed with unusual ease in the 1920s. Tall narrow windows march along the walls at even intervals. The tops of the pilasters carry a plain ornament assembled from horizontal and vertical strokes. There are no curves and no carving anywhere. What gives the wall its character is geometry applied to a material, reinforced concrete, that was still novel in a provincial school.

Seen from a distance the effect is oddly familiar: tiled roof above, pilasters standing proud of the wall plane below, so the concrete reads a little like the exposed timber framing of a traditional Japanese wall. Neither wholly Western nor wholly Japanese, the elevation places itself precisely in the mid-1920s.

A hall for kendo and judo cannot have a column in the middle of the floor, which throws the whole problem upward into the roof. The answer here was a composite truss of timber and round steel bar, steel where the members are in tension and wood elsewhere. It is a thrifty solution from a decade when steel was expensive, and it produces a light structure over a wide clear span. Photographs published by the school show that frame visible from inside, no longer concealed above a ceiling.

Within, the floor is boarded, the dado is finished in mortar and the wall above it is plain white. There is almost nothing else. Light comes through those tall windows and lies across the white plaster in vertical bands.

Written Off, Then Brought Back

The building has changed jobs several times in a century. Before the alumni hall was built it served for a while as the school library, and afterwards it went back to judo, kendo and table tennis. Generations of pupils passed through it, from the prewar middle school to the postwar high school. A round of repairs was carried out in 1950.

Then the seismic assessment caught up with it. Material published by the school in 2017 records the hall as out of use and given over to storing equipment. Buildings in that condition are usually not long for the world.

What turned it round was the school's centenary. In 2018, with donations from former pupils, the Nanachu Memorial Hall was refurbished and returned to service. It now hosts lessons, club activities and lectures. The heritage listing followed four years later, in 2022.

The sequence is worth noticing, because Japan's registration system for tangible cultural properties was designed for exactly this: buildings kept alive by being used rather than by being fenced off. A hall that had been retired, restored and put back to work is close to the ideal case the system was written for.

Visiting

One thing to understand before setting out. The Nanachu Memorial Hall stands towards the north of the central part of a working prefectural high school, where pupils are in class on ordinary weekdays. It is not a tourist site. There are no opening hours, no admission charge and no arrangements for casual visitors, and walking through the gate to ask for a look would interrupt lessons and club practice.

Anyone wanting to see the building should contact Aichi Prefectural Handa Senior High School in advance. For questions about the heritage listing itself, the prefecture's announcement names the Handa City Museum, under the city board of education, as the point of contact. Details for both appear on the official pages listed in the references.

The same applies to photography: ask the school before taking pictures on the grounds, and avoid times when pupils are about.

For access, Sumiyoshicho Station on the Meitetsu Kōwa Line is about 8 minutes to the east on foot. Handa Station on the JR Taketoyo Line is further, roughly 25 minutes to the southeast. From Nagoya, a Kōwa Line service from Meitetsu Nagoya Station to Sumiyoshicho is the straightforward route. The address is 30 Deguchicho 1-chome, Handa City.