Seisa University (Former Raijo Elementary School) School Building

A Brick Schoolhouse Paid For by a Coal Company

The former Raijo Elementary School building, now the Ashibetsu campus of Seisa University (星槎大学（旧頼城小学校）校舎, also written Seisa Daigaku / Kyū-Raijō Shōgakkō Kōsha), is a two-storey brick school in Ryokusen-chō, Ashibetsu City, Hokkaido, completed in 1954 and entered on Japan's Register of Tangible Cultural Properties on 7 March 2008.

Its predecessor burned to the ground. In 1953 a fire took the wooden schoolhouse that had served the mining settlement of Raijo since 1910, when the school opened as the Raijo Education Station and took its present name in 1917. Roughly 1,450 children were enrolled at the time.

What happened next is the part that surprises people. The rebuilding was not funded by the national treasury. Mitsui Mining's Ashibetsu colliery covered the entire cost, reported at 52 million yen, furnishings included, on the grounds that the pupils were the children of its own workforce. The company chose brick, a material that would not burn twice.

Around 700,000 bricks went into the walls, laid in English bond on both the outer and the inner faces. The plan is straightforward once you see it from above: a staff wing opens its entrance to the west, a north classroom wing runs east from it for more than 100 metres, and a south classroom wing joins at right angles to form a T. Both classroom wings use a single-loaded corridor, with rooms on one side and windows on the other. The hipped roof is clad in sheet iron. Recorded building area is 2,232 square metres, with classroom space added in 1956 and 1957 and a programme of repair work carried out in 2003. Parts of the structure are reinforced concrete rather than brick.

Why the Building Was Registered

Registration came on 7 March 2008 and was gazetted on 19 March, in the 58th round of listings, under registration number 01-0095. The criterion applied was the one reserved for buildings that could not easily be reproduced today.

Brick schools are uncommon in Japan, and a brick school of this size surviving intact is rarer still. Most masonry school buildings of the modern era were demolished after the war or lost to earthquake-resistance retrofits. Here the brick was never plastered over on the inside, so the bond pattern is visible in the corridors as well as on the street elevation.

Then there is the length. The straight classroom range measures 106 metres, described in Japanese sources as the longest single-line brick school corridor in the country. Standing at the west end and looking down it, the receding line of doorways gives a fair sense of what 36 classrooms meant in practice.

The numbers behind that scale belong to the coal boom. Ashibetsu had five major collieries operating at once and a population that peaked above 75,000. Raijo Elementary reached 41 classes and 2,214 pupils in 1958. The school closed in 2002 as the coalfield emptied out, and in 2004 Seisa University, a correspondence university run by the Seisa Group of Kanagawa Prefecture, reopened the building as its Ashibetsu campus.

In 2019 the school joined the Japan Heritage story "Coal, Iron and Port" (Tantetsukō), which links the collieries of the Sorachi region with the steelworks at Muroran and the port of Otaru.

What to Look For on a Visit

Start with the bond. English bond alternates a course laid end-on with a course laid lengthwise, and once you have picked out the pattern on the west elevation it becomes hard to stop reading the wall. The brickwork is workmanlike rather than decorative, which suits a building put up in a hurry for 2,000 children.

Walk the north side for the long view. Photographs rarely convey 106 metres; the eye does.

Practical matters. The building is normally locked and the interior is not open for casual visits. Enquiries in advance are the usual route, and the site has been opened to the public for occasional events in recent years. The exterior can be viewed from the surrounding roads at any time. The nearest stop is Raijō Gakkō-mae on the Sorachi Kotsu Raijo bus route from Ashibetsu, about two to three minutes on foot, and JR Ashibetsu Station on the Nemuro Main Line is the rail access point. Photography of the exterior is not restricted, though the site is in use and ordinary courtesy applies.

Winter changes the building completely. Red brick against deep snow, with the roofline picked out in white, is the image most local photographers come for. In 1999 the school served as a filming location for a Japanese feature film, which is how a good many visitors first heard of it.

If you have come this far, the Tanzangawa Bridge of the former Mitsui Ashibetsu Railway sits a short drive away and carries a preserved diesel locomotive and coal wagon. It was registered in 2009 and belongs to the same Japan Heritage story.