Former 90th Bank Head Office Main Building

A Romanesque Revival Bank of 1910 in Morioka

The Former 90th Bank Head Office Main Building (旧第九十銀行本店本館) is a Romanesque Revival brick bank of 1910 in Nakanohashidori, Morioka City, Iwate Prefecture, and was designated an Important Cultural Property on July 6, 2004 (Agency for Cultural Affairs).

The Agency records a two-storey brick building with a partial basement, roofed in slate and copper, with a brick wall; designation number 02444.

Designed by Yokohama Tsutomu

The head office of the former 90th Bank in the centre of Morioka was begun in 1908 and completed in December 1910 (Agency for Cultural Affairs). It was designed by Yokohama Tsutomu, a native of Morioka.

It is a two-storey brick building with a partial basement and a brick side wall to the east of the south wing. The ground floor held the banking hall, the customers' area, the strongroom, a reception room and the president's office; upstairs were the shareholders' hall and directors' rooms (Agency for Cultural Affairs).

Why It Is an Important Cultural Property

The Agency regards it as a building that, with restrained ornament, shows the move away from historical styles, an early reflection of late-19th-century European movements and important in the history of modern Japanese architecture.

Romanesque Outside, Secession Within

The exterior is Romanesque Revival, conveying the solidity of a bank, while the interiors are in the plain, concise manner of the Vienna Secession (Agency for Cultural Affairs). The trussed beams of the upper floor and the opening mechanism of its floor ventilators are also of technical note.

What to Look For

Look for the solid Romanesque Revival exterior and the plain Secession interiors (Agency for Cultural Affairs).

Visiting

It is owned by Morioka City (Agency for Cultural Affairs). According to the Tohoku Tourism Promotion Organization, the building is used as the Morioka Takuboku and Kenji Museum. A city announcement of March 2025 gives its hours as 10:00 to 17:30 (last entry 17:00), closed on the second Tuesday of each month.