Matsuo Building (former Kobashiya Kimono Store Kobe Branch)

A Department Store That Outlived the Department Store

The Matsuo Building (松尾ビル, Matsuo Biru), formerly the Kobe branch of the Kobashiya kimono store (旧小橋屋呉服店神戸支店, Kyū-Kobashiya Gofukuten Kōbe Shiten), is a reinforced concrete commercial building at Motomachi-dōri 6-chōme in Chūō Ward, Kobe City, Hyogo Prefecture, completed in 1925 and entered on Japan's national Registry of Tangible Cultural Properties on 19 December 2014. It rises five storeys above a partial basement and covers 369 square metres of ground.

Kobe lost a great deal of its early twentieth-century commercial fabric. The Great Hanshin Earthquake of January 1995 destroyed reinforced concrete landmarks along Sakaemachi and the surrounding streets, and what the earthquake spared, redevelopment often did not. The Matsuo Building came through. Local architectural circles describe it as among the oldest surviving buildings in the Motomachi shopping street.

It stands on a corner plot on the east side of Motomachi-dōri, its principal face turned west. The building was put up for Kobashiya, a kimono retailer opening a Kobe branch, at a moment when the Japanese kimono trade was converting itself into the department store business. Osaka and Tokyo had already seen the transformation: Mitsukoshi, Daimaru and Takashimaya all began as cloth merchants. What went up on Motomachi-dōri in 1925 was a retail building designed for that new kind of shopping, with floors stacked vertically and customers moving between them.

Kobashiya is long gone from the address. The building carries the name of the company that owns it now, Matsuo Tochi Tatemono, and its ground floor holds a drugstore while the upper floors are let as offices.

Taishō Design, Read Off a Facade

The Agency for Cultural Affairs registered the building under the criterion covering structures that set a standard in design. Its registration number is 28-0600, from the 79th round, announced and effective on 19 December 2014.

What the record singles out is the exterior composition. Across the ground floor front runs a triple arcade of three large openings. Above it, the upper storeys carry tall narrow arched windows, again grouped in threes. Window sills project in three stepped stages. The Agency's description characterises the curved handling at these key points as Expressionist in flavour, and dates the whole scheme as representative of Taishō-era design tendencies.

That word Expressionist needs a little unpacking for visitors from outside Japan. In European architecture, Expressionism named a current of the 1910s and 1920s that pushed against the rectilinear discipline of the emerging Modern Movement, favouring curved, crystalline and sculpturally worked forms. Japanese architects of the Taishō period (1912 to 1926) followed the European journals closely, and the vocabulary arrived here quickly. On the Matsuo Building it shows up not as a wholesale stylistic commitment but as inflection: a curve where a straight line would have done, a stepped moulding worked into a sill.

The interior received the same attention. Capitals are decorated, and beams and cornice mouldings carry jabara-hiki run plasterwork, the technique in which a shaped template is drawn along wet plaster to produce a continuous moulded profile. Wide, well-lit sales floors were what a 1925 retailer needed. Ornament was what persuaded customers those floors were worth visiting.

Design and construction are both attributed to Takenaka Corporation, the Osaka-based contractor whose in-house design office produced a large share of Kansai's interwar commercial architecture. A Kobe Shimbun report on the building quotes a Hyogo Prefecture heritage manager based in the building itself, who identifies the designer as Matsushita Jinzaburō of Takenaka, also associated with the Asahi Kaikan in Nakanoshima, Osaka. Individual attributions of this kind rest on secondary reporting rather than on the national database entry, which records no architect, so the name is best treated as reported rather than documented.

Seeing It, and the One Thing Inside Worth Knowing About

Here is the difficulty. Motomachi-dōri is a covered shopping arcade, and the roof of that arcade cuts across the front of the building. Stand in the street and the upper part of the principal facade, which is the part the cultural property citation is really about, is simply not visible. The triple arcade at ground level you can see. The tall arched windows above it you mostly cannot.

This is a common fate for prewar buildings on Japanese shopping streets, and it produces a small irony: the arcade that keeps shoppers dry is the reason nobody looks up.

There was a window of opportunity. In 2023 the demolition of the west wing of the former Hotel Sherena, which had adjoined the site, exposed a flank of the Matsuo Building that had been hidden for decades, and its cream-coloured elevation became briefly visible from the open lot. Kobe Shimbun reported at the time that further structures on the site were also scheduled for demolition. Whether that view survives depends on what has since been built there, so anyone planning a visit should not count on it.

What you can reliably do is walk the block. Approach from the west end of the arcade, near Nishi-Motomachi, where the shopping street is quieter and the older building stock is denser. Look at the ground-floor arches, then walk around the corner into the side street and look back up. The proportions of a 1925 retail building read more clearly from an oblique angle than from directly in front.

Inside, the building keeps something unusual: a hand-operated lift with concertina gates, still in daily service. Manual lifts of this vintage have almost entirely disappeared from Japan, replaced under successive rounds of safety regulation. This one is reported to be running.

Access is limited, and it is worth being clear about why. The Matsuo Building is private commercial property in active use, owned by Matsuo Tochi Tatemono and occupied by tenants. There is no visitor programme, no admission charge and no published opening hours for the building as a heritage site. The drugstore on the ground floor keeps its own retail hours and anyone may enter it as a customer, but the upper floors are offices and the lift is for tenants and their visitors. Photographing the exterior from the public arcade is unrestricted; going upstairs to look at the lift is not something a visitor can simply do.

Getting there is easy. Motomachi Station on the JR Kobe Line and Kōsoku Kobe Station on the Hanshin and Hankyu lines both sit within a short walk, and the arcade runs continuously between them. Nishi-Motomachi Station on the Kobe Municipal Subway Kaigan Line is closer still to the 6-chōme end. Combine the visit with the Kyū-Kyoryūchi former foreign settlement to the east, or with the low modern buildings of Otsunaka-dōri one block south.