Moka City Kubo Auditorium (Former Moka Elementary School Kubo Auditorium)

A 1938 School Hall by Frank Lloyd Wright's Leading Japanese Pupil

Moka City Kubo Auditorium (真岡市久保講堂, also written Kubo Kodo or Kubo Kōdō, and registered under the fuller title 旧真岡小学校久保講堂, "the former Moka Elementary School Kubo Auditorium") is a two-storey timber assembly hall in the Tamachi district of Moka, Tochigi Prefecture, completed in 1938 and entered on Japan's list of Registered Tangible Cultural Properties on 7 May 1997.

It exists because of a private gift. In 1937 Kubo Teijiro (久保貞次郎, 1909-1996), an art critic living in the town, went to Moka Elementary School with an offer: he would pay for a new auditorium to mark the eightieth birthday of his grandfather, Kubo Rokubei. The Kubo family covered the entire cost. Moka's town assembly wanted to commission a bronze bust of Rokubei in gratitude; he refused firmly, and the compromise was to attach the family name to the building itself.

The commission went to Endo Arata (遠藤新, 1889-1951), the architect who had worked alongside Frank Lloyd Wright on the Imperial Hotel in Tokyo and who remained the most faithful interpreter of Wright's ideas in Japan. Endo designed three auditoriums that survive today. The other two belong to Jiyu Gakuen in Tokyo, the school whose Myonichikan building Wright himself designed. Kubo Auditorium is the largest of the three.

The First Registered Building in Tochigi Prefecture

Japan runs two parallel systems for protecting historic buildings. Designation (指定) applies to a small number of nationally outstanding structures and comes with tight controls. Registration (登録), introduced in 1996 for buildings roughly fifty years old or more, is a lighter framework aimed at modern architecture that would otherwise disappear without record. Kubo Auditorium carries the registration number 09-0001. The prefecture code 09 is Tochigi, and the sequence number 0001 means this was the first building in the prefecture to enter the new register, less than a year after the scheme began.

The Agency for Cultural Affairs recorded it under the criterion "a model of design" (造形の規範となっているもの), the category reserved for buildings whose composition sets a standard others might follow. The formal registration date is 7 May 1997, with the public notice issued on 29 May.

The structural drawing repays attention. Moka records the frontage at 45.45 metres and the depth at 19.089 metres, with a ground floor of 651.21 square metres, an upper level of 52.88 square metres, and 11.65 square metres in the two towers, for a total of 715.74 square metres. Above the open hall, a king post truss carries the triangular roof, a Western timber system that Endo used here and nowhere else among his three halls. Roof tiles cover the main volume; the towers and the front porch have flat roofs instead, which is precisely what produces the building's stepped, horizontal silhouette.

What Rewards a Slow Walk Around It

Approach from the front and the composition reads in bands. A balcony runs the width of the facade one step lower than the main floor, stretching the horizontal line. At each end of that balcony a tower rises, built originally as a lookout. The outer walls are mortar, finished flat in a pale yellow that changes noticeably between morning and late afternoon light; the entrance section switches to timber boarding. There is no applied ornament anywhere. The interest comes entirely from where the horizontals stop and the verticals begin.

Inside, the floor is a single wide expanse of boards. Galleries run along both side walls and across the rear at second-floor level, so the hall can be read from above as well as from the floor. That upper level now works as exhibition space, and the calligraphy shows, art festivals and citizens' exhibitions held here through the year are the reason the building still feels used rather than preserved.

It came close to being lost. By the late 1970s the elementary school had a new gymnasium and the ageing hall was scheduled for demolition. In 1979 former pupils formed the Society to Keep Kubo Auditorium (久保講堂をのこす会) and gathered signatures. A 1981 site survey by specialists including the architect Endo Raku, Arata's son, concluded that the building was worth saving at whatever the relocation cost. Moka moved it from the school grounds to its present site next to the city's youth and women's centre between January and August 1986. The Agency for Cultural Affairs summary gives 1987 for the relocation, one year later than the city's own account.

Interior viewing is free of charge and arranged in advance through the Cultural Affairs Division of the Moka Board of Education (telephone 0285-83-7735); renting the hall for an event carries a fee. Photography for commercial or film use requires prior permission. The auditorium sits about fifteen minutes on foot from Moka Station on the Moka Railway, the line better known for its steam services, and roughly twenty minutes by car from the Utsunomiya-Kaminokawa interchange on the Kita-Kanto Expressway. Parking is generous, with space for around 300 vehicles.