Nagoya University Hospital Gate and Outer Wall (Former Aichi Prefectural Medical College Main Gate and Outer Wall)

A school gate that opened in 1914

The Nagoya University Hospital Gate and Outer Wall (Former Aichi Prefectural Medical College Main Gate and Outer Wall) stands along the southern edge of the Tsurumai campus in Showa Ward, Nagoya, was built in 1914, and was listed as a Registered Tangible Cultural Property in 2007. Tsurumai Park lies directly across the road.

The school it once served began somewhere else. Aichi Prefectural Medical College (愛知県立医学専門学校) and Aichi Prefectural Hospital had outgrown their cramped riverside site beside the Horikawa canal, and in 1908 the prefectural assembly voted to move them. The plan placed the hospital on the eastern half of the new land and the college on the western half. Construction north of Tsurumai Park finished in 1914. Staff of the Aichi Prefectural construction office, led by Nishihara Kichijiro, drew up the design.

The gate pillars are squared granite posts about 3.2 meters tall, each divided into base, shaft and capital. An arch links the heads of the two central posts. According to the Aichi Prefectural Board of Education, those two central posts are original fabric.

The college was promoted to Aichi Medical University in 1920, passed through a national reorganization as Nagoya Medical University, and in 1939 became the medical faculty of Nagoya Imperial University. Since the war it has been the Nagoya University School of Medicine. The name changed four times. The teaching buildings were replaced. The gate and wall have not moved.

Why it was listed

The listing criterion is that the structure sets a standard in design. The Nagoya University Hospital Gate and Outer Wall (Former Aichi Prefectural Medical College Main Gate and Outer Wall) was entered on the register on 2 October 2007 and gazetted on 22 October of the same year, under register number 23-0246. A Registered Tangible Cultural Property is protected through a notification system rather than through designation, an arrangement suited to buildings that stay in daily use.

What earns the listing is the way two periods sit on top of each other in one structure. The wall was laid as Taisho-era brickwork, then resurfaced in 1930 in scratch tile and terracotta. Frame from the 1910s, skin from the 1930s. The sequence is legible from the pavement.

Gates and walls designed by a prefectural public works office, surviving together along a single street frontage, are not common in Japan. Repairs were carried out again in 1999, but the design skeleton has held.

Telling stone from tile

Close up, the pillars and the wall feel entirely different. The granite is coarse-grained and turns a deeper grey in the rain. The wall face is clad in tile scored with fine vertical grooves, so the stripes rise and fall depending on where the sun sits.

The wall is built as a run of pilasters at regular intervals with panels stretched between them. Fired terracotta blocks are set into the corners of each pilaster. The ornament repeats geometric forms, a leaning toward Expressionism that the Aichi Prefectural construction office favored in the early Showa years.

This is the westernmost of three gates ranged along the south road. Its eastern neighbour, the Former Aichi Prefectural Aichi Hospital Main Gate and Outer Wall, is nearly identical in design, and beyond that a service gate carries a much longer stretch of wall. Walking the three from west to east traces, on the ground, where the 1914 college plot ended and the hospital plot began.

If you stop anywhere, stop under the arch between the two central posts. The stone overhead has taken 110 years of rain.

Visiting

The gate and wall face a public road, so they can be seen from the pavement at any hour. There is no admission charge and no booking. Because the Nagoya University Hospital Gate and Outer Wall (Former Aichi Prefectural Medical College Main Gate and Outer Wall) forms the boundary of a working hospital, viewing is from outside only.

Photography from the pavement is unrestricted. Inside the boundary is a place of medical care, so avoid shots that include patients or staff. Press and commercial shoots go through Nagoya University's media office.

The nearest stations are Tsurumai on the JR Chuo Main Line and Tsurumai on the Nagoya Municipal Subway Tsurumai Line, both a 5 minute walk. Leaving Tsurumai station by the Meidai Byoin exit brings you out close to the south road. There is no visitor parking, so public transport is the practical option.

To take in the full length of the wall, cross to the Tsurumai Park side and turn around. During cherry blossom season the park side fills up, and the clearest head-on view comes early in the morning.