Former Kamo-Gun Bank Haguro Branch

Former Kamo-gun Bank Haguro Branch: A Meiji Bank Reborn as a Village Hall

Step through the porch of the building that Haguro residents now call Koyumi-no-shō, and a carved dragon looks down at you from the ridge tile above. On the curved gable just below, a phoenix spreads its wings across the wooden pendant. These were not decorations chosen for charm. They were a statement of solvency. A century ago this modest wooden structure on a village road was a bank, and in the late Meiji period a country carpenter could still vouch for an institution's standing with a chisel.

The building sits in the former village of Haguro, on the northern edge of present-day Inuyama in Aichi Prefecture. It went up in the Meiji 40s, the stretch of years running roughly from 1907 to 1912, built by a local man named Yoshino Risaemon as the Haguro branch of the Kamo-gun Bank. The bank itself was founded in Gifu in 1910, so the branch likely opened around that time, though the inscription scratched into one of the roof tiles points to these years rather than an exact date. It stood on the old Inageki Kaidō, the road linking the castle town of Inuyama toward Nagoya, now Aichi Prefectural Route 27.

What the building is, more than anything, is a record of how a small Japanese town in the early twentieth century imagined the modern West. Its carpenter had never studied European architecture in any formal sense. He worked the way carpenters had always worked, in wood, with tiled roofs and plastered walls, and reached for Western forms he had seen in pictures or in the larger banks of the cities. The result belongs to a category Japanese architectural historians call giyōfū, literally "pseudo-Western style": buildings that are Japanese in bone and Western in costume.

A Bank That Outlived Four Names

The branch had a restless corporate life. In the early 1920s the Kamo-gun Bank renamed itself the Tōnō Bank. A merger a few years later folded it into the Shichijūroku Bank, and in 1928 another absorption made it a branch of the Ōgaki Kyōritsu Bank, a Gifu institution that still operates today. The Haguro office happened to be that bank's first and only branch in Aichi Prefecture, which makes this small wooden building the point where a Gifu bank first crossed the provincial line.

The banking ended in 1930, when the branch was closed. In the spring of 1931 a local figure named Fukutomi Jōichi bought the building and moved his family in. Fukutomi chaired the Inuyama town assembly and cared deeply about medical care in the farming districts; his voice carried weight in the founding of two regional hospitals. Around 1933, when the old highway was widened, the whole house was lifted and dragged back from the roadside by hikiya, the traditional Japanese technique of relocating a building intact on rollers. During that move its orientation changed: built to face east as a bank, it was set down facing south.

By 1943 the former bank had become a rural clinic, the Haguro consulting room of Aihoku Hospital, and after the war it returned to use as the Fukutomi family home. A bank, a residence, a doctor's office, a home again: few buildings carry that many lives in their floorboards.

Why It Is Protected

By the 1990s the house was facing demolition. The owner had reached that decision when Inuyama's committee on historic buildings recommended that it be kept and put to public use. The city accepted the building as a donation in 1995, took it carefully apart, and stored the pieces. Between 1999 and the end of that year it was rebuilt on a new site, the grounds of a former children's park near Haguro Station, and reopened in 2000 as a community facility.

The new name, Koyumi-no-shō, reaches much further back than the bank. In the medieval period this district was part of an estate called Koyumi-shō, held by the powerful Fujiwara family. A local tradition adds that the name itself, meaning "small bow," comes from bamboo once cut here that made good material for archery bows.

In 2013 the building was entered on Japan's register of Tangible Cultural Properties as the Former Kamo-gun Bank Haguro Branch. This is the lighter of two national systems: registration, rather than the stricter designation reserved for National Treasures and Important Cultural Properties, is meant to protect a wide range of historic structures while allowing them to stay in everyday use. The reason for listing is straightforward and rare. Apart from the buildings preserved at the nearby open-air Meiji-mura museum, this is the only giyōfū structure still standing in the Inuyama area, and it keeps the look of a small provincial bank from the Meiji years better than almost anything else in the region.

What to Look For

Start outside, with the roof. The dragon on the ridge tile and the phoenix on the gable pendant are the building's proudest gestures, both auspicious creatures borrowed from East Asian tradition rather than from Europe. Then walk toward the back, where the windows tell a different story: here the carpenter set Western pediments, the small triangular crowns of classical architecture, above the openings. The same wall surfaces explain the giyōfū idea in plaster. The walls are finished in white shikkui, a traditional lime plaster, but the corners are worked in arai-dashi to imitate cut and stacked stone, the kind of masonry the carpenter would have associated with a serious Western building.

Inside, the entrance hall opens straight up to the ceiling of the second floor, a tall well of space unusual in a building this size, with a narrow gallery running around its upper edge. Look up into the second-floor Japanese room and you find the bank's own iconography again, worked into the carved transom panels above the sliding screens.

One last detail waits by the entrance. A cherry tree there grows with its roots lifted clear of the ground, a form known as negari-zakura, and in 2013 the city named it a Landscape Important Tree. In early April it flowers over the porch where the dragon keeps watch.

Around Haguro

Inuyama rewards a full day. The city is best known for Inuyama Castle, whose keep is one of only a handful in Japan ranked as a National Treasure and counts among the oldest surviving castle towers in the country, standing above the Kiso River about twenty minutes away by train. Closer to the architectural theme of Koyumi-no-shō is Meiji-mura, a large open-air museum that has rescued and reassembled dozens of Meiji-period buildings from across Japan, including the entrance hall of Frank Lloyd Wright's Imperial Hotel.

Haguro itself repays a slow look. The district keeps the ruins of Haguro Castle, fought over during the Komaki-Nagakute campaign of 1584, and at least one sake brewery that has worked here since the mid-nineteenth century. Koyumi-no-shō stands a three-minute walk from Haguro Station on the Meitetsu Komaki Line, which makes it an easy stop on the way to or from the castle and the museum.