Former Furukawa Mining Wakamatsu Building

The Building That Wakamatsu Refused to Lose

The Former Furukawa Mining Wakamatsu Building (旧古河鉱業若松ビル, also written Kyu-Furukawa Kogyo Wakamatsu Biru) is a two-story brick office block completed in 1919 at Honmachi in Wakamatsu Ward, Kitakyushu, Fukuoka Prefecture, and was listed as a National Registered Tangible Cultural Property on 8 July 2008 under registration number 40-0059.

The site is a wedge. Two streets converge here at a sharp angle, and the architects simply accepted the geometry rather than fighting it, giving the building a triangular footprint with a blunted point aimed at the water. Obayashi Corporation carried out the construction. Furukawa Mining opened the office as its branch headquarters in the year the company pushed into Wakamatsu, and for most of the twentieth century the building watched coal barges work the Dokai Bay waterfront a short walk away.

Wakamatsu had been shipping cargo long before that. Rice tax levies moved through the port in the Edo period, and from the Meiji era the coal seams of the Onga River basin turned the harbor into one of the busiest coal transshipment points in Japan. Shipping agents, trading houses, banks and colliery offices lined the streets behind the quay. The stretch of waterfront known locally as the Wakamatsu Band still carries a row of these commercial buildings, and the Furukawa office anchors its western end.

What separates this building from the others is not its age but the fact that it very nearly stopped existing. In 1995 the owner at the time, Nittetsu Mining, concluded that the structure had deteriorated past the point of economic repair and moved toward demolition. Residents organized instead. The campaign gathered more than 46,000 signatures and pledges of donations exceeding 74 million yen. Kitakyushu City reversed the outcome in 2001 by deciding on preservation and adaptive reuse, funded repairs, and reopened the building to the public on 18 September 2004 as the Kitakyushu City Former Furukawa Mining Wakamatsu Building.

Why the Register Took It

Japan's registration system for Tangible Cultural Properties, introduced in 1996, operates on a lighter touch than the older designation system. Registration recognizes a building's contribution to the country's historic landscape and encourages continued use rather than freezing a structure in place. Three criteria exist, and the Wakamatsu building was registered under the first: contribution to the historic landscape of the nation.

That criterion fits the case exactly. The Agency for Cultural Affairs record describes the building through its silhouette and its street presence rather than through rare construction technique. Read the official description and the emphasis falls on the corner position, the two towers, and the vertical rhythm of the façade. This is a building valued for what it does to a view.

The Structure Itself

Brick, two stories, with a roof of copper sheet and slate in part, and a building footprint of 297 square metres. The city records the plot at 592.28 square metres and total floor area at 603.38 square metres. Interior framing and roof trusses are timber, a common enough combination in Japanese brick construction of the period, where masonry handled the envelope and carpentry handled everything above and inside it.

The 2004 works were substantial. Seismic upgrading introduced horizontal steel trusses at roof level and at the second floor to restrain out-of-plane movement of the brick walls, with steel bracing added along both the long and short axes. The reception hall, office space, safe room and timber staircase to the second floor were kept in their original form. Other interiors were reworked for their new function. Externally the restoration reinstated the mansard roof with its single-lap natural slate and copper standing-seam work, the cast copper roof ornaments, and the exterior wall decoration rendered in glass-fibre-reinforced concrete finished to imitate the original washed aggregate. Inside, plaster capital ornaments were repaired back to their earlier profile.

One quiet detail explains the building's survival. It stands close to the water on pine piles that have remained permanently below the water table, and timber kept continuously wet does not rot. The brickwork above showed no serious structural damage when surveyed, which speaks well of both the original workmanship and the foundation condition.

Recognition arrived in stages. Kitakyushu City's architecture and townscape award came in 2006, a BELCA Award in 2007, certification as Modernization Industrial Heritage the same year, and national registration in 2008. The building is also one of the component properties of the Japan Heritage story "Kanmon Nostalgic Strait."

Standing on the Corner and Looking Up

Approach from the harbor side and the two towers read immediately. The larger one occupies the southwest corner, the smaller sits at the southeast, and between them the wall turns through the acute angle of the site. Nothing about the massing is symmetrical, which is precisely what makes the composition work from a moving viewpoint. Walk along the pavement and the relationship between the towers keeps shifting.

The wall surfaces are mortar-rendered. On the south and west elevations, pilasters faced in brick tile step forward from that render, and between each pair of pilasters a paired set of tall narrow windows runs through both floors. The effect is emphatically vertical, and it was clearly intended to be: the building is not tall, but every line on the principal elevations pushes upward.

Ornament concentrates at three heights. Around the base, at the second-floor level, and along the eaves, the detailing becomes noticeably richer than the plain wall between. Renaissance-derived motifs appear at the entrance canopy and around the tower doorway. Look closely at the entrance and the modelling is finer than the general run of provincial commercial architecture in the Taisho period.

What Survives Inside

The original plan put the general office and the safe room on the ground floor and the branch manager's room and meeting rooms above. The ground-floor reception hall, office area, safe and the timber stair survive from 1919. Everything else has been converted: two multipurpose halls of 152.27 and 95.61 square metres, three meeting rooms, and a document room of 27.72 square metres.

The document room is worth the detour. It holds material on Wakamatsu's history, including a reproduction of a bird's-eye-view map by Yoshida Hatsusaburo, whose panoramic tourist maps shaped how prewar Japan pictured its own regions. Seeing the port drawn at its commercial peak, then stepping back outside to the same streets, does more to explain the building than any label could.

Practical Matters

Entry is free and the building is open from 9:00 to 17:00. It closes on Tuesdays and over the New Year period. Halls and meeting rooms may be booked until 22:00 by prior arrangement, and those bookings carry a fee. Photography of the exterior is unrestricted from the public street; for interior photography, ask at the desk, since the halls are in regular community use and a private function may be running.

From JR Wakamatsu Station the walk takes about five minutes. The Wakato ferry landing on the Wakamatsu side is roughly two minutes away, and the ferry crossing from Tobata is itself one of the better ways to arrive, since it delivers you to the waterfront at the scale the buildings were designed for. By car, allow around twenty minutes from the Kokura Station Kita ramp of the Kitakyushu Urban Expressway. Parking is available, and on weekends the Wakamatsu Ward Office lot opens to visitors from 9:00 to 21:00.

Give yourself time for the surrounding streets. The Wakachiku Museum, the former residence of the novelist Hino Ashihei known as Kahakudo, and the Benzaiten landing stage are all within the same district, and the row of prewar commercial buildings along the south quay makes more sense visited together than singly.