Mukogawa Women's University Koshien Hall (formerly Koshien

Mukogawa Women's University Kōshien Kaikan: Endō Arata's 1930 Hotel

In April 1930, a resort hotel with green tiled roofs and terracotta-clad walls opened beside the Mukogawa River in Nishinomiya, Hyōgo. Within a few seasons it was being mentioned in the same breath as the Imperial Hotel in Tokyo, captured in a slogan of the era — "the Imperial in the east, the Kōshien in the west."

That building still stands. It survives not as a hotel but as a working campus of Mukogawa Women's University, registered in 2009 as a National Tangible Cultural Property and used today by students of the School of Architecture. Tour groups walking through the entrance hall on a weekday morning will pass first-year design students at their drafting tables, occupying what was once the main dining room.

The name on the entrance gate reads "Kōshien Kaikan." For anyone interested in modern Japanese architecture, this is one of the most rewarding doors in Kansai to step through.

A Hotel Born of Two Frustrations

The story of Kōshien Hotel begins with two men who had reason to want a second chance: the manager Hayashi Aisaku (1873–1951) and the architect Endō Arata (1889–1951).

Hayashi had run the Imperial Hotel in Tokyo through the years when Frank Lloyd Wright was designing its famous new wing. Cost overruns and construction delays forced both men out before the building was finished — Wright back to America, Hayashi out of the manager's chair. Endō, Wright's protégé and chief on-site architect, stayed behind and saw the Imperial Hotel through to completion in 1923.

When Hanshin Electric Railway sought a flagship hotel for its new resort district along the Mukogawa, the company turned to Hayashi as general manager. Hayashi turned to Endō. The two had survived the Imperial Hotel together; now they would build the resort hotel they had been imagining.

Construction took thirteen months. Ōbayashi-gumi was the contractor. The schedule was unforgiving, partly because Prince Takamatsu and his consort were due to stay on the night of 23 April 1930 before sailing from Kobe to Europe — and partly because Hayashi, who had watched the Imperial Hotel hemorrhage money over its long build, was determined not to repeat history.

The hotel opened on 15 April 1930. Babe Ruth visited. The novelist Tanizaki Jun'ichirō dined here, as did the film actress Hara Setsuko. The composer Yamada Kōsaku is said to have conducted at a ball in the West Hall. Then the war came. In 1944 the building was requisitioned for use as a naval hospital; after 1945 it spent roughly a decade as housing for US Occupation officers; afterwards it lapsed into the custody of the Ministry of Finance and was left to deteriorate. Its career as a hotel had lasted just fourteen years.

The Mukogawa Gakuin educational foundation purchased the property from the national government in 1965 on the condition that the historical exterior be restored. Decades of careful repair followed. Since 2006 the building has served as the home of Mukogawa Women's University's architecture programmes.

Why It Was Registered as a Cultural Property

The Agency for Cultural Affairs registered Kōshien Kaikan as a National Tangible Cultural Property on 8 January 2009. The agency's description is worth reading carefully: a reinforced-concrete building of four stories plus basement and rooftop tower, partly tile-roofed, with a building area of 2,056 square metres, distinguished by its dynamic spatial composition and geometric terracotta ornament in the manner of Frank Lloyd Wright, combined with Japanese decorative motifs — a pioneering example in the Kansai region of a fully developed Western-style hotel.

What the cool prose does not convey is how rare the survival is. Wright's own Imperial Hotel was demolished in 1968, with only its entrance lobby reassembled at Meiji Mura in Aichi. Kōshien Kaikan is one of the few surviving full-scale buildings in Japan in which Wright's design language is carried by his closest pupil, and it has been continuously maintained at the original site.

Other honours have accumulated. The Ministry of Economy, Trade and Industry recognised it as Modern Industrialisation Heritage in 2007. The Building and Equipment Long-life Cycle Association awarded it the 17th BELCA Prize in the Long Life category in 2008. The Hyōgo Prefectural government designated it an Important Landscape Building in 2009. DOCOMOMO Japan selected it in 2013 as a significant work of the Japanese Modern Movement.

A practical footnote: the building emerged from the Great Hanshin-Awaji Earthquake of 1995 with only minor damage. Wright's preference for low, broad masses anchored by interlocking volumes turned out to be unusually well suited to seismic stress, and Endō's plan inherited that virtue.

What to Look For Inside

The plan is symmetrical: a central block containing the entrance, front desk, and main lobby, flanked by two great horizontal wings — the former main dining room to the east, the banquet hall (the West Hall) to the west. Two cruciform residential blocks once held seventy guest rooms above, stepped up like terraces so that the silhouette tapers as it rises.

The decorative themes repay slow looking.

The lucky mallet motif. The uchide no kozuchi, the mallet that grants wishes when shaken, appears throughout the building — cast in terracotta, set into stone reliefs, hidden in tilework around the fountains. It was chosen as the hotel's emblem because Nishinomiya lies near Nishinomiya Shrine, dedicated to Ebisu, who is conventionally pictured carrying this mallet.

Nikka stone and Taizan tile. The exterior walls combine pale Nikka stone, quarried in Komatsu in Ishikawa Prefecture and similar in character to the Ōya stone Wright used at the Imperial Hotel, with Taizan tiles — the lustrous, hand-finished glazed ceramics produced by the Taizan Pottery in Kyoto, which also supplied the Imperial household. Wright's signature "scratch" brick courses appear too, set directly into the concrete formwork.

The light ceiling of the West Hall. The banquet hall's ceiling is a vast grid of ichimatsu-kōshi, a checkerboard lattice of paper-screen panels lit from above. The reference is to the geometric pattern of yukimi-shōji, the snow-viewing screens of Japanese reception rooms, translated into a scale and a luminous quality that no traditional room ever attempted.

Geometry and water. Endō scattered Wright's signature circular and rectilinear motifs through the wall reliefs and floor tiles. Small fountains in the entrance courtyard make a clear, bell-like sound recalling the suikinkutsu water-koto of Japanese gardens. The bar floor — a playful patchwork of inlaid tiles — is a detail visitors often miss until it is pointed out.

The green-glazed roof. The roof tiles were fired on Awaji Island, where Japan's largest concentration of tile workshops still operates. Their colour shifts from yellow-green to deep moss depending on the light, and they read as an unbroken horizontal band when the building is seen from a distance.

One thing has not survived: a hotel guest room. All seventy were converted to teaching spaces in the 1965 reconstruction, except for a fragment of fourth-floor tatami room once used to serve sukiyaki to foreign guests. What today's visitor sees is the building's public face — the lobbies, halls, and exteriors — which is in fact the part that mattered most to Endō and Hayashi as designers.

Around the Building

The upper Kōshien district is a quiet residential neighbourhood of large houses and pine trees along the Mukogawa embankment. Kōshien Stadium — the home of the Hanshin Tigers and of Japan's annual high school baseball championship — lies about two kilometres south. The two share a name and a postal code, but otherwise belong to different worlds; the stadium is dense, loud, and concrete, while the area around Kōshien Kaikan is dignified and slow.

The Mukogawa embankment east of the building is a popular walking course. From late February into April the riverbank fields fill with rapeseed flowers; cherry trees follow shortly after. Nishinomiya Shrine, source of the lucky mallet motif and home of the Tōka Ebisu festival in early January, lies about three kilometres south-east and is a worthwhile pairing with a Kōshien Kaikan visit. For another building of architectural significance, the Yodokō Guest House (the former Yamamura Residence, designed by Frank Lloyd Wright himself in 1924) sits in Ashiya, two stations away on the Hanshin line.