Former Akita Bank Head Office Main Building

A Bank Building That Outlived Its Bank

The Former Akita Bank Head Office Main Building (旧秋田銀行本店本館, Kyū Akita Ginkō Honten Honkan) is a two-storey brick structure in Ōmachi, Akita City, completed in 1912 and designated an Important Cultural Property of Japan on 27 December 1994. Residents call it the Akarenga-kan (赤れんが館), the red brick hall, and since 1985 it has served as the main building of Akita City's Akarenga Local Museum (秋田市立赤れんが郷土館).

Construction began in 1909 and took three years. The bank had been founded in the early Meiji period as one of the national banks chartered after the currency reforms, and by the turn of the century it wanted a head office that announced its standing in the prefecture. What went up on the corner of Ōmachi was brick, two storeys, with a roof of sheet copper and brick walls extending along the south and north sides of the lot.

The building stopped being a bank long ago. In 1981, marking the centenary of the bank's founding, the property passed to Akita City. The city restored it and opened it to the public in 1985. That sequence matters when you visit: what you walk through is a working bank interior preserved rather than a reconstruction.

Why It Was Designated

The Agency for Cultural Affairs lists the building under designation number 02307, in the category of modern commercial and business architecture, and records the reason for designation under the first criterion: excellence of design. Not structural rarity, not age. Design.

The reason becomes clear once you know who drew it. The exterior came from Yamaguchi Naoaki (山口直昭), then an engineer employed by Akita Prefecture, who worked in a Renaissance idiom. The interior came from a different hand, Hoshino Otosaburō (星野男三郎), who worked in Baroque. Two designers, two vocabularies, one building. Meiji-era Japanese architects were absorbing European styles at speed, and this building shows a provincial office doing it with unusual confidence.

The exterior reads as a red and white composition. The foundation is Oga stone, quarried from the peninsula northwest of the city. The ground floor is faced in white porcelain tile, the upper floor in red brick. Stand across the street and the horizontal band between the two levels does most of the work of the facade.

Two ridge tags (munafuda), the wooden boards on which builders recorded dates and names, are designated alongside the building as attached items.

What to Look for Inside

The old banking hall is the reason most people stay longer than they planned. Trusses carry the roof, which allowed the room to open into a full two-storey void with a gallery running around the upper level. Plaster reliefs cover the ceiling. Marble of several kinds appears in the fittings, and there is carved wood and moulded plaster at the cornices and door surrounds. From the gallery you look down on the counter line where tellers once worked.

Three fireplaces survive in the building, each detailed differently. The one in the former president's office is built from benishima-ishi and usugumo-ishi, two decoratively veined Japanese stones, and the contrast between them is easier to see in person than in photographs.

The old vault room is worth a slow look. Steel doors, steel window shutters, and a large safe that was in genuine service during the bank years. The adjoining former document store was added in the early Shōwa period along with the vault, and now displays Akita City craft work, including ginsen-zaiku silver filigree.

Climb the stairs and note the treads: domestic white marble, unusual for a regional bank of the period. On the second-floor corridor, photographic panels show what central Akita looked like in the Meiji years.

The former reception room for distinguished guests carries the densest decoration in the building. A coffered ceiling, parquet flooring, keyaki (zelkova) doors with inlay work, and wall cloth dyed with persimmon tannin on which a laurel wreath pattern was painted by hand.

Also on the second floor of the brick building is a memorial room for Sekiya Shirō, a metal-hammering artist recognised as a Living National Treasure, with his home studio reconstructed. The adjacent modern wing houses a memorial gallery for the Akita printmaker Katsuhira Tokushi and hosts changing exhibitions.

Planning a Visit

The museum opens daily from 9:30 to 16:30, with last admission at 16:15. During the Kantō Festival in early August, from the 3rd to the 6th, closing moves to 19:00. It closes over the New Year period from 29 December to 3 January, and for irregular exhibition changeover days, so a phone call ahead is sensible if you are travelling a distance.

Admission is 310 yen for adults, free for high school students and younger. A combined ticket at 370 yen also covers the Akita City Folk Performing Arts Museum and the Former Kaneko Family Residence nearby. An annual pass costs 770 yen. Card, electronic money and code payments are accepted.

Volunteer guides from the Akarenga Kyōdokan Volunteer Association give tours of the interior at no extra charge beyond admission, but they are not on site continuously. Requests need to reach the museum three days before your visit, by telephone.

Getting there is straightforward. From the west exit of JR Akita Station the walk takes about fifteen minutes, passing Senshū Park and the Asahi River. City buses also serve the area.

Photography policies differ between the architecture and the exhibited works, so ask at the reception desk before you start shooting. Staff are used to the question.