Former Tsushima Shinkin Bank Head Office

A Provincial Bank Built in Concrete

The Former Tsushima Shinkin Bank Head Office (旧津島信用金庫本店, Kyū Tsushima Shinyō Kinko Honten) is a reinforced concrete bank building of 1929 on Honmachi in Tsushima City, Aichi Prefecture, entered on the national register as a Registered Tangible Cultural Property on 27 March 2006. It has two storeys and a building area of 221 square metres.

Tsushima City records that the columns, beams, floors, walls and roof were all cast in reinforced concrete, an unusual commitment for a country town at the time. Aichi Prefecture's cultural property survey identifies the original client: the building went up as the Tsushima branch of the Nagoya Bank. It later served as the head office of the Tsushima Shinkin Bank, the use that gave the property its registered name.

Honmachi was the commercial spine of Tsushima before the war, and a bank on this street was making a statement about where money in the western Owari plain was handled.

Why the Former Tsushima Shinkin Bank Head Office Was Registered

The registration criterion applied was the one for buildings that set a standard in design. The Agency for Cultural Affairs and the prefectural survey both treat the Former Tsushima Shinkin Bank Head Office as a representative case rather than an exceptional one, and that is the point of it. Provincial banks across Japan in the 1920s and 1930s reached for the same architectural language, and few of those buildings survive intact.

The style has a name in Japanese architectural history: fukkōshiki, a stripped-down Renaissance manner in which the classical vocabulary is retained but the ornament is thinned out. On the front, the ground-floor entrance is framed at the centre and flanked by paired columns. Above it the second storey uses pilaster forms to push the eye vertically. The external walls are finished in scored artificial stone, washed to expose the aggregate, with granite facing around the base and at the centre of the facade.

Inside, the plan followed the standard of its type: a banking hall and a strongroom on the ground floor, a branch manager's office and meeting rooms above. The Agency's description notes an open well above the banking hall with a gallery running around it. The prefectural account is more precise about chronology, describing that void and its gallery as the arrangement at completion, above the portion of the hall on the entrance side of the two round columns. Anyone comparing the two texts should read the prefectural one as the fuller record of what has changed.

Two details reward attention. There is now no staircase connecting the ground floor to the first floor; the original stair was timber, housed in a wooden annexe at the rear that wrapped around the projecting strongroom. And the roof over the strongroom was cast far thicker than the roof over the rest of the building, a security decision made visible in the structure itself.

The property carries registration number 23-0213 and belongs to the 50th round of registrations.

What to Look at on the Ground

Approach from the south along Honmachi and the building announces itself by mass. Its neighbours are timber townhouses; this one is a grey concrete block with a granite plinth, and the contrast is the whole story of 1929 in a provincial Japanese town.

Look at the surface treatment before going in. Artificial stone washed to reveal the aggregate reads as masonry from a distance and as something else entirely from two metres away, where the scored joints turn out to be drawn rather than built. The granite at the base is real stone, and the change in material at waist height is easy to feel with a hand.

Inside the former banking hall, the two round columns near the middle of the room are the key to reading the original volume. The interior finishes vary by function: stone dado in the customer area, boarded dado in the banking hall itself, marble around the strongroom door.

The site also holds a dozō storehouse wing, which is not part of this registration. Tsushima City suggests it was an outbuilding of the Tsushima Bank, which opened here in 1893, or of a merchant house that stood on the plot earlier. It gives a useful measure of what the block looked like before concrete arrived.

Among the displays now installed in the building is a full-size model of a makiwara boat from the Owari Tsushima Tennō Festival, which can be seen at close range.

Visiting the Former Tsushima Shinkin Bank Head Office

The building is owned by Tsushima City and operates as the Tsushima City Tourism Exchange Center, nicknamed Matsuri no Yakata Tsushimaya. Entry is free.

Opening hours are 9:00 a.m. to 5:00 p.m. The centre closes on Mondays, and where a Monday falls on a public holiday the closure moves to the next day that is not a holiday. It also closes from 1 to 3 January and from 29 to 31 December. The telephone number is 0567-25-2701.

Because the interior is a public exhibition space rather than a working bank, photography is straightforward in normal circumstances, though events occupy the hall from time to time and staff may ask visitors to hold off.

Tsushima Station on the Meitetsu Tsushima Line is about ten minutes on foot, a distance of roughly 700 metres. There is no car park at the building; paid car parks nearby are the usual answer for drivers. Coming by road, the Yatomi interchange on the Higashi-Meihan Expressway is about fifteen minutes away.