Sasayama Elementary School

Sasayama Elementary School in the Castle's Third Bailey

Sasayama Elementary School (篠山小学校, Sasayama Shōgakkō) is a municipal primary school in the third bailey of the Sasayama Castle ruins in Kitashinmachi, Tanba-Sasayama City, Hyogo Prefecture, and six of its buildings, an auditorium of 1935 and five two-story wooden classroom blocks put up between 1952 and 1955, were registered as Registered Tangible Cultural Properties in 2024.

This is a working school, and lessons go on every day inside the castle moats. The school says it uses five buildings standing on the strip of land between the inner and outer moats of Sasayama Castle, and the Agency for Cultural Affairs introduced it as a school still in use in the castle's san-no-maru, the third bailey.

In his online diary, the mayor of Tanba-Sasayama notes that the exterior walls are painted a pale pink and that the castle grounds are visible from the covered walkways.

How the Sasayama Elementary School Buildings Are Laid Out

The five classroom blocks of Sasayama Elementary School are all two-story timber buildings, long on the east-west axis, with Kirizuma-zukuri gabled roofs laid in Sangawara-buki pantiles. They stand roughly parallel, numbered One to Five from north to south. Each has a single-loaded corridor, or Katarōka, along its north side, with the classrooms opening off it to the south.

Two covered walkways, one on the east and one on the west, run north-south and tie the blocks together. Building No. 1, with the main entrance, sits at the northern edge of the site, and both walkways start from it and continue to Building No. 5. Buildings No. 2 and No. 3 fit between the two walkways, while Buildings No. 4 and No. 5 extend east past the eastern one. The auditorium stands east of Buildings No. 2 and No. 3 and is turned the other way, with its ridge running north-south.

A photograph taken by the local Tanba Shimbun from the keep platform of the castle ruins shows the blocks stacked one behind another, Building No. 5 on the right, with the auditorium roof showing behind Building No. 3. From that height, the whole plan is easy to read.

History of Sasayama Elementary School and Its Seismic Retrofit

Sasayama Elementary School marked its 150th anniversary in 2022. According to the Tanba Shimbun, a school building was completed in the third bailey in 1910 and was extended and remodeled many times afterward. The present five blocks replaced that older building piece by piece after the Second World War.

Building dates in the Agency for Cultural Affairs database give the order. Building No. 5 came first, in 1952. Building No. 4 and the eastern half of Building No. 1 followed in 1953, Building No. 3 in 1954, and Building No. 2 and the western half of Building No. 1 in 1955. Only the auditorium is prewar. It was finished in 1935, well before the rebuilding began, and the Agency notes that its gable carries numerals giving 1934, the year work started, in the imperial calendar.

The buildings very nearly did not survive. The Tanba Shimbun reports that moving and rebuilding the school was once considered, both to protect the castle site and because of earthquake safety, and that strong local support for keeping the school led instead to a seismic retrofit. A presentation published by the Ministry of Education, titled "Old Wooden School Buildings and New Wooden School Buildings," cites Sasayama Elementary School as a wooden school that went on to be strengthened after scoring 0.06 in its seismic assessment.

The national database records alterations in 2014 for all six buildings, and the school says the retrofit and renovation work was completed in March 2015. Looking back on it, the mayor wrote that seismic retrofitting of a wooden school had hardly been attempted at the time. He credited Professor Yoshiaki Hanada of Kobe Design University, Professor Mikio Koshihara of the University of Tokyo, the local architectural office Saimoto Kenchiku Jimusho (才本建築事務所), and above all the townspeople who campaigned to keep the buildings.

The Six Registered Buildings of Sasayama Elementary School

Following a recommendation by the Council for Cultural Affairs on November 24, 2023, all six buildings of Sasayama Elementary School were entered on the national register as Registered Tangible Cultural Properties on March 6, 2024, under the consecutive numbers 28-0807 through 28-0812.

• Sasayama Elementary School Building No. 1: 1953, extended 1955; 2-story timber; building area 718 square meters
• Sasayama Elementary School Building No. 2: 1955; 2-story timber; building area 309 square meters
• Sasayama Elementary School Building No. 3: 1954; 2-story timber; building area 352 square meters
• Sasayama Elementary School Building No. 4: 1953; 2-story timber; building area 546 square meters
• Sasayama Elementary School Building No. 5: 1952; 2-story timber; building area 520 square meters
• Sasayama Elementary School Auditorium: 1935; 1-story steel frame; artificial slate roof; building area 586 square meters

The five classroom blocks were registered for their contribution to the historic landscape, and the auditorium as a model of design. The Agency for Cultural Affairs sees inventive ideas from the period of postwar reconstruction in each of the classroom blocks, and regards the auditorium as one of the few steel-framed school auditoriums surviving from before the war.

Visiting Sasayama Elementary School

Sasayama Elementary School is an active primary school, and the Sasayama Kindergarten also uses some of its spare classrooms. We found no notice of public openings or guided visits to the classroom blocks or the auditorium, so please stay off the grounds and look from outside. If you take photographs, keep pupils out of the frame.

As the mayor puts it, the castle ruins and moats lie right in front of the school, and the castle side is the best place to take in the row of buildings.

To get there, take the JR Fukuchiyama Line to Sasayama-guchi Station, change to a Wing Shinki local bus, get off at the Nikaimachi stop, and walk about 400 meters. Sasayama-guchi is roughly 1 hour 10 minutes by train from JR Osaka Station.