Former Ishikawa Bank Hashiba Branch

A Bank Built to Fit an Awkward Corner

The Former Ishikawa Bank Hashiba Branch (旧石川銀行橋場支店, Kyū Ishikawa Ginkō Hashiba Shiten) stands at 1-7-10 Owarichō, Kanazawa City, Ishikawa Prefecture, was completed in 1929, and was entered on Japan's register of Tangible Cultural Properties on 8 November 2004.

The site is a problem. It occupies an irregular plot facing the Hashiba intersection, just south of the Asanogawa Ōhashi bridge, where several streets meet at angles that no rectangular building would accommodate. Shimizu-gumi, the contractor and designer, and the firm that became Shimizu Corporation, solved it by curving the plan. The corner rounds off, and the elevation follows the road rather than fighting it.

That curve is why people remember the building. Walk toward it along the Asano River and it presents a continuously turning face, with no single flat frontage to photograph and no obvious point at which the composition resolves.

It was built for the Takaoka Bank, a predecessor of the Hokuriku Bank, and only later carried the name of the Ishikawa Bank, under which it entered the cultural property register. The Ishikawa Bank collapsed in 2000. Kanazawa City acquired the building, and it has been the Kanazawa Bungeikan, the city's literary centre, since November 2005.

Reading the Facade

Four storeys of reinforced concrete over a footprint of 101 square metres. The elevation is Neo-Renaissance in its basic vocabulary, and the key move is a horizontal string course that divides the wall roughly one part above to two parts below.

The effect of that division is worth standing still for. Placed where it is, the string course makes a four-storey building read as three. The proportions settle. A commercial block that could have loomed over a low-rise district instead sits comfortably in it, and visitors regularly describe the building as three storeys before discovering the mezzanine on the stairs.

Either side of the entrance are engaged columns with Ionic capitals, the volute-scrolled order borrowed from Greek temple architecture and used here, as on countless interwar banks, to signal solidity to depositors. The Agency for Cultural Affairs registration cites the varied elevation composed of curved surfaces and the building's prominence as a local landmark.

Registered Tangible Cultural Property is the lighter of Japan's two protection systems for historic buildings, introduced in 1996 and operating by notification rather than permission. This building carries registration number 17-0116, from the forty-fourth round of listings, under the criterion for structures contributing to the historic character of the national landscape. It also holds Kanazawa City's own designation as a preserved building, a municipal scheme created in 1982 that regulates exteriors only.

Neither status is the same as Important Cultural Property designation, which is a stricter and far more selective system. The distinction is often blurred in travel writing about Kanazawa, where the castle's genuinely designated buildings sit a short distance away.

Inside: A Literary Centre in a Bank

The building now holds three floors of exhibits about Kanazawa's writers. The city produced Izumi Kyōka, Tokuda Shūsei and Murō Saisei, referred to locally as the three literary masters, and the Kanazawa Bungeikan exists as a working base for the city's literary activity rather than solely as a display.

The ground floor is an exchange salon, showing work by writers connected to Kanazawa and film material set in the city. The second floor holds the permanent Kanazawa Itsuki Hiroyuki Collection, with manuscripts, personal effects and memorabilia of the novelist Itsuki Hiroyuki. The third floor is a literature floor where every winner of the Izumi Kyōka Prize for Literature and the accompanying Citizens' Literature Prize can be read. Kanazawa established the Kyōka prize in 1973, the first literary award created by a Japanese municipality.

The former vault has been turned into a small gallery, which is the detail most visitors mention afterwards.

Opening hours run 10:00 to 18:00, with last admission at 17:30. The building closes on Tuesdays, moving to the following non-holiday weekday when a Tuesday falls on a public holiday, and over the new year period from 29 December to 3 January. Admission is 100 yen for adults, 100 yen for visitors aged 65 and over and for holders of a disability certificate together with one carer, free on public holidays for those categories, and free for high school students and younger. An annual pass costs 1,040 yen. Kanazawa's common museum ticket, covering seventeen city cultural facilities, is accepted.

Photography is permitted on the first and third floors. The Itsuki Hiroyuki Collection on the second floor does not allow it. Allow about thirty minutes.

Buses from Kanazawa Station reach the Hashibachō or Owarichō stops in a few minutes, leaving a walk of around three minutes; the Kanazawa Loop Bus stops at Hashibachō Kinjōrō-mae, about one minute away. There is no car park. The Izumi Kyōka Memorial Museum is roughly a minute on foot, the Higashi Chaya district and Kazuemachi are both a short walk, and the Owarichō Chōmin Bunkakan, a 1907 bank building of black-plastered storehouse construction with a Western interior, stands about five minutes away and makes an instructive comparison in how two generations of Kanazawa bankers chose to present themselves.