Kagawa Prefectural Office Former Main Building and East

Columns and Beams, Cast in Concrete

An eight-story tower at the center of Takamatsu carries rows of slender columns, projecting beams, and deep eaves that throw a band of shadow across every floor. The frame was poured in reinforced concrete in 1958, yet its rhythm comes straight from the wooden joinery of a Japanese temple or shrine. The architect Kenzo Tange designed it for the government of Kagawa Prefecture, reworking the logic of traditional carpentry into a modern material instead of copying any single old building.

The designated property has two connected parts, counted officially as a single structure. A low three-story wing stands beside the tall block, and the ground floor of the high building was deliberately left almost empty. Tange lifted it onto a piloti, an open colonnade about seven meters high, so people could walk straight through the base of the building rather than being halted at a guarded door. Offices rise above that open level, topped by a rooftop tower of three more floors.

One point can confuse first-time visitors. The prefecture now calls the whole 1958 complex the "East Building," because a newer, taller main building opened next door in 2000. The original Tange tower, once the main building, became the "former main building," and that is the name used in its cultural-property registration.

Why It Became an Important Cultural Property

On 9 February 2022 the building was registered as a national Important Cultural Property under the name Kagawa Prefectural Government Office, Former Main Building and East Wing. It was the first government office constructed after the Second World War to reach that rank, and it is still in daily use by prefectural staff. The listing rests on two grounds: excellence of design and high historical value.

The historical weight comes from what the building set in motion. Governor Masanori Kaneko wanted a headquarters fit for a postwar democracy, open rather than imposing. The painter Genichiro Inokuma, born in Marugame in Kagawa, introduced him to Tange, then a young architect. Tange answered with a scheme built on the five points that Le Corbusier had laid out for modern architecture: supports raising the building on piloti, a roof garden, a free interior plan, horizontal bands of windows, and a facade released from load-bearing duty.

He pulled the lifts and mechanical services into a central core and left the floors around it open to rearrangement. Office buildings across the country borrowed that layout for decades afterward. The structural design was the work of the engineer Yoshikatsu Tsuboi, and the high block reaches a maximum height of about 43 meters. DOCOMOMO Japan, which documents important modern architecture, later named it one of twenty buildings it regards as modernist heritage.

What to Look For on a Visit

Begin under the piloti. It was planned from the start as a square for residents, a place for events and casual passage, and the circular stone lanterns set into it were designed by Tange himself. Step into the lobby and a glass wall reaching to the ceiling thins the boundary between the interior and the garden outside.

The lobby holds the building's best-known artwork, a wall painting by Inokuma called Wa-Kei-Sei-Jaku (和敬清寂), the four ideals of the tea ceremony: harmony, respect, purity, and stillness. Against the grey of bare concrete, Inokuma worked in black, white, red, and blue, pushing warmth and motion into the quiet surfaces around it.

The furniture rewards a second look. Pieces in the public areas were designed in Tange's studio, while the governor's desk and related fittings came from the designer Isamu Kenmochi; much of the work was built by the Takamatsu workshop Sakura Seisakusho. Near the first-floor entrance, a small gallery shows photographs, documents, and a letter Tange sent Inokuma, politely pressing him to finish the mural before the opening. Original balcony railing parts, taken off during recent repair work, are displayed here too.

When the building first opened, its rooftop level was the highest viewpoint in Takamatsu, and within half a year something close to a sixth of the prefecture's population had climbed up to look out over the Seto Inland Sea.

That recent repair was a seismic upgrade. Through the mid-2010s and into December 2019, engineers installed base-isolation devices beneath the foundations and tied the high and low blocks together at ground-floor level, allowing the structure to absorb an earthquake while its 1958 face stays unchanged.

Around the Building

The office sits in the Bancho district of central Takamatsu. From JR Takamatsu Station it is roughly a 20-minute walk, or a short ride on the city loop bus from Kawaramachi, getting off at the Kencho-Nisseki-mae stop. Ritsurin Garden, one of Japan's finest stroll gardens and a designated Special Place of Scenic Beauty, lies a short distance to the south. Toward the harbour you reach Tamamo Park, the surviving grounds of Takamatsu Castle, with the Kagawa Prefectural Museum close by. The newer main building next door has a public observation room near its top, an easy way to take in the city and the inland sea after touring the 1958 wing below.