Hido Elementary School

A Wooden Modernist School Above a River in Ehime

Hizuchi Elementary School (日土小学校, also written Hizuchi Shōgakkō) stands at Hizuchi-chō in Yawatahama City, Ehime Prefecture; its Middle Building of 1956 and East Building of 1958 were together designated Important Cultural Properties on 28 December 2012.

The valley gives no warning. You follow the Kiki River north out of Yawatahama, past mandarin terraces and a road that keeps narrowing, and then two long two-storey timber buildings appear along the north bank with their windows running unbroken from one end to the other and a second-floor veranda cantilevered out over the water.

The architect was a municipal employee. Matsumura Masatsune worked in the building section of the public works department at Yawatahama City Hall, and he designed these school buildings as part of his job.

Matsumura Masatsune

Matsumura was born in 1913 in Niiya, in what is now Ōzu City, Ehime Prefecture. He studied at Musashi Higher Technical School, now Tokyo City University, under Kurata Chikatada, an architect deeply engaged with European modernism and with the Japanese folk craft movement. In 1935 he joined the office of Tsuchiura Kameki, who had worked for Frank Lloyd Wright at the Imperial Hotel and had gone on to build some of the sharpest modernist houses in Japan.

In October 1947 Matsumura took a post at Yawatahama City Hall. Over the following thirteen years he designed schools, a library, hospitals and other public buildings for a provincial city on the Bungo Channel. Local accounts record that in 1960 a magazine named him among ten architects representing Japan, an unusual distinction for a man on a municipal payroll. He opened his own practice in Matsuyama that year and worked privately until his death in 1993.

The interest of his career lies in the constraints. He had public budgets, local carpenters, timber, and children as the client group. What he produced from that is now studied internationally.

How the Buildings Are Made

Both buildings are timber, two storeys, under shallow gabled roofs of slate with sections in sheet metal. The Middle Building covers 375.80 square metres, the East Building 394.53 square metres. Neither is large.

The structure is hybrid. Timber post-and-beam framing carries the buildings, with steel introduced at the points where timber alone would fall short. In the Middle Building, steel trusses form the second-floor beams, which buys ceiling height that conventional timber joists could not, and bracing of round steel bar drawn to a central ring stiffens the bays between posts. The roof truss above is timber. The East Building uses a steel truss ridge purlin with rafters bearing on it, and its second-floor veranda rests on three raking columns of round timber.

Then the windows. Matsumura fixed the window frames outside the structural frame rather than between the posts, which removes the interruption of the columns from the glazing line and produces horizontal bands of window running the length of the elevation. On the East Building's south face he pushed the frame roughly thirty-six centimetres clear of the structure and put a bench in the resulting depth, under the sill, at the height of a child. On the second floor of the Middle Building the gap between the corridor roof and the main roof is also glazed. Slate eaves shade the first-floor windows and timber louvre hoods interrupt the second-floor glass at mid height.

The Cluster Plan of the East Building

The East Building's plan is what brought international attention. Instead of the standard Japanese arrangement of classrooms strung along a single corridor, Matsumura set a courtyard between the corridor and the classrooms and connected each classroom door to the corridor through a small antechamber. This is the cluster type, then a recent idea in school design, and the East Building is understood as the first and only realisation of it in timber in Japan.

The courtyard does practical work, drawing light and air into the depth of the plan. The antechambers do social work, giving each class a threshold of its own rather than a door onto shared traffic.

The fittings repay slow looking. Shoe lockers at the entrance are lifted clear of the floor on slender supports. Classroom storage is built into the wall and also lifted. A display shelf beside each antechamber is carried on a single post. In the library, shelf boards span between ladder-like steel uprights, and the upper part of the partition wall is set with cross-sections of bamboo arranged as constellations. The south wall of the counselling room is faced in a chequer of Iyo kasuri, the local indigo ikat cloth, and gold paper. In the Middle Building the corner of the staff room beside the stair is cut back as a triangular recess holding a small shelf.

Floors are tongue-and-groove board throughout; corridor walls are vertical boarding, classroom walls have boarded dados with plywood above, ceilings are board. Nothing is expensive. Everything is considered.

Designation, Awards and Restoration

The school was founded in 1875 as Keimō School, renamed Hizuchi Ordinary Elementary School in 1909, and moved to the present site the following year. Yawatahama City absorbed Hizuchi village in 1955, and the rebuilding programme followed at once: contract for the Middle Building on 18 November 1955 and completion on 30 April 1956; contract for the East Building on 1 May 1958 and completion on 25 October the same year.

Recognition arrived slowly. DOCOMOMO Japan included the school in its first selection of twenty modern buildings in 1999. Yawatahama City designated the two buildings as municipal cultural properties on 6 September 2007. Conservation and rehabilitation work on the Middle and East Buildings, carried out alongside the rebuilding of the remaining West Building, finished in June 2009. In November 2012 the school received the World Monuments Fund and Knoll Modernism Prize, and the national designation as Important Cultural Property followed on 28 December that year, under the criterion for outstanding design. Forty-two sheets of the original drawings are designated as attached properties.

Visiting

Hizuchi Elementary School is a functioning primary school with children in it on ordinary days, and that is the single most important thing to know before planning a trip.

Yawatahama City runs open days roughly three times a year, during the long summer, winter and spring school holidays. Admission is free and the sports ground serves as the car park. On these days visitors can walk the corridors and classrooms, and on some occasions guides are available, including senior pupils who have prepared their own explanations of the building. Certain rooms such as the principal's office, staff room and infirmary stay closed.

On any other day the school declines interior viewing and asks visitors to look at the exteriors only. That request is made plainly on the school's own pages and it is worth honouring; people do arrive from a long way off and are turned back. Check the Yawatahama City website for the current year's dates before travelling.

The site lies north of central Yawatahama in the Kiki River valley, and public transport is limited. Roads immediately around the school are narrow, so parking on the street is not acceptable; groups arriving by minibus or coach should contact the city in advance. Yawatahama itself is the ferry port for Kyushu, which makes the school a reasonable stop for anyone crossing the Bungo Channel.