Former Ashiya Municipal Miyazukacho Housing

Public Housing Built of Stone

The Former Ashiya Municipal Miyazukachō Housing (旧芦屋市営宮塚町住宅, commonly shortened to Kyū-Miyazukachō Jūtaku) is a two-storey stone-built apartment block completed in 1953 in Miyazukachō, Ashiya City, Hyōgo Prefecture, and it entered the national register as a Registered Tangible Cultural Property (Structure) on 17 August 2020. It was designed in-house by the architecture section of Ashiya City's construction department.

Walk south along Ashiya Chūō-dōri and the block appears on the left, a plain rectangular volume in cream-coloured stone among newer concrete apartment buildings. Nothing about the massing is unusual. The material is what stops people.

Almost every municipal housing block built in Japan during the postwar reconstruction was reinforced concrete or timber. This one is masonry, and according to the operators of the building it is understood to be the only stone-built public apartment block of its kind in the country. That claim rests on the absence of known comparators rather than on an exhaustive national survey, so it is best treated as a strong likelihood rather than a settled fact.

Why Stone, in 1953?

The Agency for Cultural Affairs record describes the walls plainly: courses of tuff and courses of concrete block, laid alternately. The stone is Nikkaseki (日華石), a tuff quarried at Komatsu in Ishikawa Prefecture, soft enough to cut easily and pale enough to read as cream rather than grey. A curator at Ashiya City has pointed out that the workability of the stone is probably why it was chosen. Get close and each block turns out to carry a scratched surface texture, no two faces quite alike.

The reason for going to stone at all is less settled. Documents prepared by Ashiya City for the registration process suggest a combination of pressures: the Japanese cement supply in the early 1950s was short, and there was simultaneous policy pressure to build cities out of non-combustible material. Someone appears to have proposed a compromise, threading reinforcing bars through the joints between stones so that a masonry wall could behave more like a reinforced one. The city's own material presents this as a probable explanation rather than a documented decision. The Japanese-language literature on the building is candid that the choice remains unexplained.

Registration recognised exactly this. The criterion cited is that the building would not be easy to reproduce (再現することが容易でないもの). Its registration number is 28-0742, from the 96th round of registrations.

The 52FC Plan and the Postwar Apartment

Behind the unusual walls sits an entirely conventional interior logic. The Agency for Cultural Affairs notes that the layout follows the 52FC type of the national standard designs for public housing, giving each dwelling a kitchen and two rooms.

Those standard designs matter more than their bureaucratic names suggest. The best known of them, the 51C type worked out in 1951 by Yoshitake Yasumi's laboratory at the University of Tokyo, packed two separate sleeping rooms and an eating space into roughly 35 square metres. The point was to end the practice of eating and sleeping in the same room, and to give parents and children separate sleeping space. The dining kitchen, the DK that still appears in every Japanese property listing as 2DK or 3LDK, came out of that exercise. Ashiya's building belongs to the same family of plans, one year on.

So the block holds two histories at once: a national programme for how ordinary families should live, and a local improvisation about what to build it from. The total footprint is 177 square metres, with eight dwellings across the two floors.

What Is There Now

Ashiya City retired the building from housing use in 2017. Rather than demolish it, the city put it through seismic strengthening and an interior refit, keeping the exterior as built, and reopened it in 2019 as rented workspace. The project was run through the city's gender equality section as part of an initiative to support women starting businesses in Ashiya, which is an unusual departmental route into building conservation and worth knowing about.

The eight units now hold makers' studios, shops and cafés. Past tenants have included a glass studio, leather and shoemaking workshops and a long-established Ashiya tea merchant's salon; the line-up has changed at least once since 2019, and the official site is the place to check who is currently in residence and what their hours are. Visitors who are not customers are welcome to look at the building, and plenty of people come simply to stand in front of it.

The adjacent plot to the north, once occupied by more municipal housing, has been a shared allotment called CITY FARM since 2020, dug out by neighbours who cleared buried concrete rubble by hand. Small markets and events are held in the garden at intervals.

Getting there takes about ten minutes on foot heading south from JR Ashiya Station. There is no admission charge and no fixed opening time for the building as a whole, because it has no single operator's front desk; individual shops keep their own hours, mostly daytime, with closing days that vary. The exterior is visible from the street at any hour, and photographing it from the pavement is unproblematic. The Former Ashiya Post Office Telephone Office, another registered property, is roughly fifteen minutes' walk north.