Former Ashiya Post Office Telephone Office

A 1929 Exchange Building on an Ashiya Street Corner

The Former Ashiya Post Office Telephone Office (旧芦屋郵便局電話事務室, also written Kyū-Ashiya Yūbinkyoku Denwa Jimushitsu) is a two-storey reinforced concrete building completed in 1929 in Ōmasu-chō, Ashiya City, Hyōgo Prefecture, and it entered the national register as a Registered Tangible Cultural Property (Structure) on 28 June 2017. It stands on a corner plot in a district that is otherwise houses and low apartment blocks, which is part of why it startles people who round the corner without expecting it.

Ashiya in the late 1920s was filling up with the second homes of Osaka and Kobe business families, and a private telephone line had become an ordinary fixture in those households. According to Ashiya City, the exchange was built after strong lobbying by local business figures who wanted their own switching station rather than a line routed through a neighbouring town. What the Ministry of Communications gave them is considerably grander than the switchboards inside ever required.

That surplus of ambition is one reason the building is still standing.

The design is credited to Uenami Akira, a staff architect with the Ministry of Communications (逓信省), with construction by the Morita-gumi firm. Uenami is recorded as an Osaka native who finished the architecture course at Tokyo Imperial University in 1922 and joined the ministry that same year, which places him in the same working generation as Yoshida Tetsurō and Yamada Mamoru, the two designers whose names are most often attached to Japanese communications buildings of the period.

What Registration Recognises

Japan operates two parallel systems for historic buildings. Designation as an Important Cultural Property or National Treasure is the stricter route, reserved for a few thousand structures and accompanied by tight controls on alteration. Registration, introduced in 1996, is the lighter one: it applies to buildings roughly fifty years old or more, and it is designed to keep them in use rather than freeze them. Owners gain some tax relief and access to technical advice, and in return they notify the Agency for Cultural Affairs before making substantial changes.

The Ashiya exchange was accepted under the criterion of being a model of architectural form (造形の規範となっているもの), which is the register's way of saying that a building demonstrates a standard of design worth holding up as an example. Its registration number is 28-0659, from the 87th round of registrations.

The Agency for Cultural Affairs records the structure as one building on a plan that runs long on the east-west axis in an L shape, with a footprint of 732 square metres. For an exchange serving a suburb of this size in 1929, that is a generous floor area, and the extra room went into circulation space and daylight rather than equipment.

Reading the Exterior

Start with the tilework. The walls are faced in scratch tile, the vertically combed clay tile that Japanese architects used heavily through the 1920s and 1930s, and the lower storey and the upper storey are deliberately given different colours. The effect is subtle in flat light and obvious in late afternoon, when the horizontal band between the two tones catches a shadow.

The north elevation carries the building's best single move: a side aisle behind a run of semicircular arches, repeated along the length of the wall. Arcades of this kind belong to the vocabulary of European civic architecture, and their appearance on a telephone exchange in a Japanese commuter suburb says a great deal about how the Ministry of Communications understood its own status in the 1920s.

Then look between the windows. Several bays carry carved lion heads and small relief panels. They are easy to miss at street level and worth stopping for. Secondary accounts describe the overall handling as Neo-Renaissance with Art Deco curves in places, though the Agency for Cultural Affairs record itself simply notes the tile, the arches and the reliefs as the distinguishing features.

The walls have not always looked like this. Around 1944 the exterior is said to have been painted black with coal tar as air-raid camouflage, and in 1968 it was given a white spray coating. Conservation work in 1986 is recorded as having taken the later finishes back off. What visitors see now is much closer to 1929 than anything that stood here through the middle of the twentieth century.

Visiting: The Building Is a Restaurant

Manual switching ended here in 1981, and NTT West continued to use the premises until around 2004. Since 2005 the building has operated as Ashiya Monolith, a restaurant and wedding venue run by the Novarese company, which markets it under the name Kyū-Teishinshō Ashiya Bekkan. The conversion was recognised with the 20th BELCA Award in the Long Life category in 2011, given by the Building and Equipment Long-life Cycle Association for well-handled continued use of existing buildings.

This matters practically: there is no ticket office and no museum. The interior is accessible by eating there or attending an event. The official restaurant site lists operating hours of 11:00 to 19:00 with lunch service from 11:30, and Wednesday as the regular closing day; reservations are the sensible approach, and hours do change seasonally, so confirm before travelling. Photography inside is at the operator's discretion, particularly when a wedding is in progress, so ask when you book.

The exterior can be looked at freely from the pavement at any hour, and for many visitors that is the main event. Walking there takes about five minutes from the south exit of JR Ashiya Station and about four minutes from Hanshin Ashiya Station. Both are on the main line corridor between Osaka and Kobe, so the building fits easily into a half day that also takes in the Yodoko Guest House, Frank Lloyd Wright's 1924 house for the Yamamura family and an Important Cultural Property, and the Former Ashiya Municipal Miyazukachō Housing about fifteen minutes' walk away.