Kumamoto University Administration Building (former Kumamoto Higher Technical School Main Building)

A 1924 Concrete Building on the Kurokami Campus

The Kumamoto University Administration Building (熊本大学本部), originally the Main Building of Kumamoto Higher Technical School (旧熊本高等工業学校本館, also written Kyū Kumamoto Kōtō Kōgyō Gakkō Honkan), stands in Kurokami, Chūō Ward, Kumamoto City, was completed in 1924, and was entered on the national register of Tangible Cultural Properties on 2 September 1998.

It exists because something else burned down. In October 1922 the school lost its wooden main building, a two-storey structure with a partial third floor that had gone up in 1908. Rather than rebuild in timber, the Ministry of Education chose reinforced concrete: three storeys, a building footprint of 1,038 square metres, and a load-bearing frame of a kind that very few Japanese schools yet possessed.

The engineer credited with the design was Nagaoka Yūe (長岡勇衛), a technical officer of the ministry. Nagaoka was working at a moment when Japanese architects were still deciding what concrete should look like. Steel and cement had been available for two decades, but the vocabulary of ornament, proportion and window rhythm had been developed for brick and stone, and it did not transfer cleanly.

Kumamoto Higher Technical School itself dated from 1906, when the engineering division of the Fifth Higher School was separated out and given its own name and its own ground on the south side of the old Bungo Kaidō highway. The institution trained civil, mechanical and mining engineers, and it became the engineering faculty of Kumamoto University after the war.

Why It Was Registered

The building was registered under the criterion covering works that serve as a model of design. In the Agency for Cultural Affairs assessment, it counts among the early reinforced concrete school buildings erected at institutions under the direct control of the Ministry of Education, and its detailing shows how architects of the period were feeling their way into the new material.

Two features carry that argument. The first is the treatment of the columns, which are expressed on the wall surface as flat vertical members rather than hidden inside it. The second is the ornament at the top of those members, described in the official record as Secession-style capital decoration. The Vienna Secession had reached Japan through journals and returning students, and its flattened, geometric ornament suited concrete far better than classical mouldings did, because it could be cast rather than carved.

The chronology is worth holding in mind. The fire came in October 1922. The Great Kantō Earthquake of September 1923 destroyed much of Tokyo and Yokohama and settled a long argument in favour of reinforced concrete for public buildings. The Kumamoto replacement was finished in 1924. The old wooden building and its successor sit on either side of the point at which Japanese construction practice changed.

Registration is not the same as designation. A Registered Tangible Cultural Property is protected by a lighter regime than an Important Cultural Property, one designed for buildings that remain in everyday working use. That is exactly the situation here: registration number 43-0011 belongs to a building where staff process student records and hold meetings every weekday.

What to Look For, and What Lies Under the Floor

Stand back far enough to take in the whole elevation and the logic of the design becomes readable. The vertical members divide the wall into bays; the windows sit between them; the ornament gathers at the top where the members meet the upper cornice. It is a simple system, applied with restraint, and it reads as a building that is thinking about how to be honest about its structure.

Then there is what you cannot see. In 2015, refurbishment work on the building prompted an excavation by the university's Buried Cultural Property Research Centre. Red brick footings turned up in several places inside and around the structure. They belong to the 1908 wooden main building, the one that burned. The drawings for that lost building survive too, and are held by the university's engineering faculty.

The Kurokami South Campus has a second historic building worth the walk. The Faculty of Engineering Research Archive (工学部研究資料館), the former machine testing workshop of 1908, is an Important Cultural Property, and eleven machine tools bought between the Meiji and Taishō eras are kept inside in working order. It opens to the public on the third Thursday of each month, from 13:00 to 16:00.

North across the old highway, the Kurokami North Campus holds four red brick Important Cultural Properties from the Fifth Higher Middle School of 1889, among them the Goko Memorial Hall, open from 10:00 to 16:00 with last admission at 15:30 and closed on Tuesdays. Those brick buildings were badly cracked by the Kumamoto earthquakes of April 2016 and were closed for years; repairs ran from 2017 to 2022.

Practical notes for the administration building itself: the interior is offices and is not open for visits, and there are no tours. The exterior can be seen from the campus grounds, which are generally accessible on foot during the day. Photographing the building from outside is normally unproblematic, though it is courteous to avoid photographing staff and students. From Kumamoto Station, take a Sankō bus toward Kusudanchi or Hikari-no-Mori and get off at Kumamoto Daigaku-mae; the ride takes roughly 30 to 40 minutes depending on traffic.