Nagoya City Hall

A City Hall Chosen by Competition

Nagoya City Hall (名古屋市庁舎, also written Nagoya Shichōsha) is the municipal government building at Sannomaru, Naka Ward, Nagoya City, Aichi Prefecture, completed in 1933 (Shōwa 8) and designated an Important Cultural Property of Japan on 10 December 2014.

It sits on the old third bailey of Nagoya Castle, facing west onto Ōtsū-dōri. The Aichi Prefectural Government Office stands immediately to the south. Look north past Dekimachi-dōri and the castle's inner compounds begin.

The site became available in 1928, when the Third Cavalry Regiment and other army units stationed in Sannomaru relocated to the outskirts. A preparatory committee formed in February 1929, and that October the city opened a public competition for the design. Five hundred and fifty-nine entries came in. The jury, which included Sano Toshikata, Takeda Goichi and Tsuchiya Jun'ichi, awarded the gold prize in January 1930 to Hirabayashi Kingo.

Hirabayashi was born in 1894 in Toyoyama, Aichi Prefecture, and trained in architecture at Tokyo Higher Technical School. He had already won first place in the 1922 competition for the Osaka Prefectural Government Office, entering jointly with Okamoto Kaoru. When he submitted his Nagoya scheme he was working as an engineer at a reconstruction finance company in Tokyo, in the aftermath of the Great Kantō Earthquake. The city's own Architecture Section handled the working drawings. Construction began in November 1931 and finished on 6 September 1933, built by Ōkura Doboku.

Why It Was Designated: Design of Outstanding Quality

The Agency for Cultural Affairs designated the building under the criterion of outstanding design quality. The brief Hirabayashi worked to was described as a modern style based on Japanese taste, and the result belongs to what is often called the imperial crown style: a Western structural body wearing a Japanese roof.

The clock tower on the west front carries that idea. It rises the height of five storeys, reaching 53.5 metres, and is capped by a double-tiered pyramidal roof covered in copper sheet worked to look like tile, with the eaves cut up into gables. A shachihoko, the mythical fish-tailed creature that crowns Nagoya Castle, sits at the centre of each tier, and another with four faces looks out from the summit. Applied pilasters stress the vertical line. The tower and its shachihoko were Hirabayashi's insistence on a silhouette that could only be Nagoya, and the jury rated them highly.

Below the roofline the walls are handled in three bands: stone facing on the first floor, brown tile from the second to the fourth, pale yellow tile on the fifth. Tile was a local speciality of the region, and the building uses it as a compositional material rather than a surface finish. Tile and terracotta also decorate the carriage porch and the parapet crown, both of which carry roof tiles in the Japanese manner.

At more than 24,000 square metres of total floor area, this was an unusually large city hall for its date. Its neighbour, the Aichi Prefectural Government Office of 1938, was designated on the same day in 2014, and the two were designed to sit together with the castle.

What You Can See, and What You Cannot

The building still runs as a city hall, so a visit here is unlike a museum visit. On weekdays when offices are open, from 8:45 to 17:15, anyone may walk the corridors and staircases free of charge. Offices are off limits, as are the roof and the balconies.

Start in the central hall. The atrium climbs about 20 metres. Arched beams run in sequence overhead when you look up from the ground floor; look down from an upper landing and the staircases wrapping the void read almost as an optical puzzle. The columns and stair balustrades are faced in Kozakura, a fine marble from Yamaguchi Prefecture. It was surplus stock from the National Diet Building, and the Diet and this city hall are said to be the only two places where it was used.

The light fittings on the central stair handrail were made by Komori Shinobu, a ceramicist known for his research into glazes. They are installed on every floor and are lit with a soft green light during office hours. His work turns up elsewhere too, in corridor decoration and in the tiles of the reception room.

The north corridor runs about 100 metres, unusually long, and film crews use it often. Look toward the base of the clock tower from here and parts of the wall appear stained. That is what remains of the camouflage paint applied during the war as protection against air raids. Chemicals removed most of it afterwards, but traces stayed.

On the second floor, the central corridor and the space in front of the assembly chamber are faced in ceramic tile, again by Komori. The corridor walls are dark blue and gold, a combination used nowhere else in the building; the wall outside the chamber uses kiln-transmuted tiles in blue, red, yellow, brown and purple. Many of the corridor windows still hold their original 1930s glass, whose uneven surface bends the view outside.

The Round Chamber

The assembly chamber at the end of the second-floor corridor is nearly square in plan but the seating is circular, arranged around a stenographers' position with the speaker's chair and rostrum to the west. A roof light brings daylight down into the room. The circle is said to express the hope that debate would proceed smoothly. The interior is not open to general viewing, but plenary sessions of the Nagoya City Assembly can be observed from the public gallery on the third floor, which is the one way to see the room in use. The formal reception hall on the fifth floor and the state guest room on the fourth are likewise closed to visitors.

Photography is allowed, with the request that the faces of staff and members of the public are kept out of shot. No visitor parking is provided. Nagoyajō Station on the Meijō subway line, formerly called Shiyakusho Station, brings you out at the building.