Former Kiji Elementary School Hoanden

Two Square Metres of State Shinto, Cast in Concrete

The Former Kiji Elementary School Hoanden (旧木慈小学校奉安殿, Kyū-Kiji Shōgakkō Hōanden) is a reinforced concrete shrine-form structure built in 1935 at Kiji on Kakeroma Island, Setouchi Town, Kagoshima Prefecture, and registered as a Registered Tangible Cultural Property on 3 August 2006.

A hōanden was a small building put up in the grounds of a prewar Japanese school to hold two objects: the goshin'ei, the official photographic portraits of the Emperor and Empress issued by the state, and a certified copy of the Imperial Rescript on Education promulgated in 1890. Pupils and teachers bowed when they passed it. On ceremonial days the portraits were brought out and the Rescript was read aloud.

The Kiji example covers 3.7 square metres, roughly two metres by two. It stands on a raised plinth fitted with a balustrade, faces west toward what was once the school ground, and is built of reinforced concrete throughout.

Kiji Elementary School closed in 1982, its pupils absorbed into Satsugawa Elementary. The classrooms are gone. The small concrete building stayed.

A Shrine Vocabulary in an Industrial Material

What earned the registration is the way the design was handled. The register cites the first criterion, that the building is a model of design, and the Agency for Cultural Affairs description closes with a single phrase: a hōanden modelled on shrine architecture.

The specific borrowings are worth reading off the building. The roof is kirizuma, a straight gable, entered on the long side (hirairi). Under the eaves runs a single layer of widely spaced rafters. A gegyo pendant hangs on the bargeboard where the gable comes to its point. Along the ridge sit chigi, the crossed finials that project above the roof line, and katsuogi, the short billets laid crosswise. Chigi and katsuogi are the signature of Shinto shrine building and appear on almost nothing else in the Japanese architectural repertoire.

All of this is concrete. Square pilasters are moulded at the four corners, and the wall surfaces are finished in araidashi, a washed-aggregate render in which the surface cement is brushed away while still green to expose the stone beneath. Timber shrine details are being translated into a material that in 1935 was still new to a remote island, and the translation had a practical motive: concrete does not burn. Fire was the standing terror of the system, since a school head who lost the portraits in a blaze faced ruin, and several died attempting to retrieve them.

Setouchi Town holds six of these structures, and all six were registered together on 3 August 2006: Koniya, Setsuko, Ikeji, Satsugawa, Sukomo and Kiji. They do not look alike. The Koniya example, from around 1929, is handled in Western terms with a cornice running above the walls and pediment-like panels front and back. Kiji went the other way, toward the shrine. Seeing two of them makes the point that the form was never standardised, and that local decisions shaped what each community built.

Why It Survived, and How to Reach It

On 15 December 1945 the Allied occupation issued the Shinto Directive, ending state support for Shinto, and within days the Ministry of Education began ordering hōanden cleared from schools. Most disappeared. The wording of the instruction was removal from school premises rather than demolition, and structures that were moved to shrine or temple grounds, or that stood on land the school no longer used, sometimes escaped. Kiji's survived on the site of a school that later closed. That is the ordinary reason the rare survivors exist.

These buildings are complicated objects. They belong to an education system built around emperor worship, and Japanese local governments that preserve them generally do so as physical evidence for teaching that history rather than as monuments to it. Setouchi Town owns the Kiji building and treats it as a heritage asset of the settlement.

Getting there takes a day. Setouchi Town occupies the southern end of Amami Oshima, about 420 kilometres south of Kagoshima City, and Kakeroma Island lies across the Oshima Strait. The town ferry, the Ferry Kakeroma, runs several times daily from Koniya to two ports on the island, Sesō and Ikenma, and the crossing takes about twenty to twenty-five minutes. Kiji faces Satsugawa Bay on the island's south-west side; the island bus service is timed to the ferry and runs only a handful of times a day, so a rental car or a booked vehicle place on the ferry makes the trip far easier.

There is no admission charge, no gate and no interpretation centre. You walk up to it on the old school ground and look. Photography is unrestricted, though the settlement is somebody's home village rather than a visitor attraction and the mood there is quiet by default.

Give the village itself half an hour. Kiji has held only a handful of households in recent decades. A communal plaza called a myā sits at the centre near the shore, and out on the tidal flat to the east lies an umigaki, a stone tidal weir of the kind once used to trap fish on the falling tide. The community still turns out to rebuild it, and the Kiji weir is described locally as the best preserved in the town.