Former Nagoya Court of Appeals District Court Building

A Courthouse of Red Brick and White Granite

The Former Nagoya Court of Appeals, District Court and Ward Court Building (旧名古屋控訴院地方裁判所区裁判所庁舎, also written Kyū Nagoya Kōsoin Chihō Saibansho Ku Saibansho Chōsha) is a government office building in Shirakabe, Higashi Ward, Nagoya City, Aichi Prefecture, completed in 1922 (Taishō 11) and designated an Important Cultural Property of Japan on 21 May 1984.

Three separate courts once shared the address. The Court of Appeals, the District Court and the Ward Court were housed together in a single joint building, which is why the designation carries such an unwieldy name. Locals rarely use it. Today the building operates as the Nagoya City Archives (名古屋市市政資料館), and that is the name you will see on the gate and on bus stop signs.

The Ministry of Justice Repairs and Construction Section handled the design. Kanazashi Moritarō supervised the work on site. What they produced was a three-storey structure of brick walls carried on reinforced-concrete beams and floors, roofed in slate, with a covered entrance porch and a domed tower rising at the centre of the main façade. The building area comes to 2,341.8 square metres.

Stand across the road and the colour scheme does most of the talking. Red brick, white granite trim, black slate above, green window grilles and yellow-painted sashes. Nothing about it is subtle, and that was the point: a court of appeals was meant to look like the authority it exercised.

Why This Building Was Designated

Eight courts of appeals were built across prewar Japan. Two survive. Sapporo's building dates from 1926, which leaves Nagoya, finished four years earlier, as the oldest court of appeals building still standing in the country.

Timing matters in a second way. The Great Kantō Earthquake struck in September 1923, one year after completion here. Large brick construction in Japan effectively ended with that earthquake, and this building sits at the tail of that tradition. Its structural system, brick bearing walls combined with reinforced-concrete beams and floor slabs, records a transitional moment in Japanese building technology when one method was giving way to another.

The designation does not cover the whole interior. What is protected is the exterior, the entrance hall, the central stairwell, and the third-floor conference room. Other interior spaces fall outside the scope. This is worth knowing before you visit, because it explains why some rooms feel like a working archive and others like a preserved historical interior.

From Courthouse to Archive

The Nagoya High and District Courts moved to new premises in Sannomaru in 1979, after nearly six decades here. Demolition was seriously considered. Public campaigning to keep the building led instead to designation in 1984, restoration work from 1985, and reopening in 1989 as the city's public archive. The Ministry of Education, Culture, Sports, Science and Technology owns it; Nagoya City manages it under a free loan arrangement for national property.

What to Look For Inside

Walk in through the porch and the central stairwell opens up in front of you, an atrium running through the second and third floors. Symmetry, paired columns, a staircase that splits and returns: the vocabulary is Neo-Baroque, and this room shows it more clearly than any other part of the building.

Look at the columns. Four of them read as black stone. Only the lower halves are actual marble. The upper halves are marbling, coloured plaster worked by hand to imitate stone, a technique used elsewhere in the building on other columns and wall surfaces. Once you have spotted the join, you will keep checking.

Two stained glass panels reward a slower look. The one facing you at the top of the stairs shows a pair of scales carrying two orbs of different colour, read as crime and its punishment held in balance. Above, set into the atrium ceiling, a second panel carries a sun disc standing for impartiality. Both are said to have come from a workshop in the line of Unozawa Tatsuo, an early figure in Japanese stained glass, though the attribution is not firmly documented.

The third-floor conference room is the other designated interior. Roughly forty tatami mats in area, it was returned to its 1922 appearance using surviving documents, period photographs and interviews. The single-woven carpet, the chandeliers, the curtains, the wallpaper, the desks and chairs were all reproduced. The room is not a reconstruction of a general period style but of this specific room.

One small detail on the way in: the gilded ornament above the carriage porch combines a sacred mirror and a sword, a pairing explained as a symbol of fair judgement.

Visiting

Admission is free and the building is open from 9:00 to 17:00. It closes on Mondays (or the next weekday when Monday is a public holiday), on the third Thursday of each month (the fourth Thursday when the third falls on a holiday), and from 29 December to 3 January. Photography inside is permitted, though commercial shoots and tripods require prior enquiry, and the central staircase is occasionally roped off when events are held there.

From Nagoyajō Station on the Meijō subway line, take exit 2 and walk east for about eight minutes. From Higashiōte Station on the Meitetsu Seto line it is about five minutes south. The Me~guru sightseeing bus stops at Shiseishiryōkan-minami, five minutes on foot. A small free car park exists, but the city asks visitors to come by public transport. The building marks the western end of the Bunka no Michi walking route, which links several other historic buildings in the same district.