Yamazaki Memorial Hall, Faculty of Medicine, Kumamoto

A Library Designed by the Man Who Built Kyoto's Architecture School

The Yamazaki Memorial Hall of the Kumamoto University Faculty of Medicine, formerly the Kumamoto Medical College Library (熊本大学医学部山崎記念館・旧熊本医科大学図書館, also written Yamazaki Kinen-kan), stands on the Honjō campus in Chūō Ward, Kumamoto City, was completed in 1931, and was entered on Japan's national register of Tangible Cultural Properties in September 1998.

Two storeys, reinforced concrete, 446 square metres of building area. The design was by Takeda Goichi (1872 to 1938), the architect who founded the department of architecture at Kyoto Imperial University and who is routinely called the father of the Kansai architectural world.

Takeda had studied in Europe at the turn of the century and brought Art Nouveau and Secession back with him. By 1931 he had moved past both. What he built in Kumamoto is composed as a set of boxes, mass against mass, with horizontal bands running across the whole to hold it together. The ornament that made his earlier work recognisable has gone.

The detail worth walking up to is on the first floor. The mullions dividing the upper windows are shaped in a way that has no counterpart in the rest of the building, and the national database singles them out as the design's distinguishing feature. They are the one place where Takeda let his hand show.

He was busy elsewhere at the time. Records of his career note that he served as an engineer in the Ministry of Finance construction bureau from 1925, and handled the duties of its construction section chief from 1929 to 1931. Kumamoto Medical College was a national institution, so the commission arrived through channels he was already working in.

Yamazaki Masatada, and Why the Building Bears His Name

The hall commemorates Yamazaki Masatada (1872 to 1950), professor and president of Kumamoto Medical College, described within the faculty as the figure who restored its fortunes.

He was born in Sakawa in what is now Kōchi Prefecture, graduated from Tokyo Imperial University in 1900, and took a professorship at the private Kumamoto Medical School the following year. In 1909 he went to Munich and Bonn to study obstetrics and gynaecology, returning the next year. He founded a private midwifery school in Kumamoto in 1911 and took his doctorate in medicine in 1913. After a period in Aichi, where he headed the prefectural medical college, he came back to Kumamoto in 1925 as president of the medical college and director of its attached hospital, posts he held until 1932.

The library went up in 1931, during his presidency. He kept working after he left it, publishing a biography of the Kumamoto political thinker Yokoi Shōnan in 1938 and living until 1950.

Registration came on 2 September 1998, with public notice on 25 September, under number 43-0012 in the twelfth round. The criterion applied was that the building serves as a model of design. That is a different standard from the one used for most registered structures, which are accepted for contributing to the historic landscape. Of the three registered properties in Kumamoto covered here, this is the only one admitted on the strength of its design.

The Building That Moved Forty-Eight Metres

In 2006 the university built a new central clinical block on the Honjō campus. The Yamazaki Memorial Hall was in the way.

Rather than demolish it, the university had the entire structure jacked up and shifted forty-eight metres by hikiya, the Japanese technique of relocating a building whole on rollers or rails. Moving a reinforced concrete building of this size is a considerable undertaking. The alternative was losing it, and the university chose the move.

Visitors should know what this means in practice. The hall is not a museum. It has no opening hours, no exhibitions, and no public entry, and it sits inside the working campus of a university hospital. The campus museum listing gives a telephone contact at the hospital administration office, 096-373-5988, for enquiries. The building can be seen from outside, and that is what a visit amounts to.

Come for the exterior and pair it with something you can enter. The Higo Medical Education Museum stands on the same Honjō campus, covering the line from the Saishunkan medical academy founded by the Hosokawa lord Shigekata in 1756 through to the present faculty. It opens 10:00 to 17:00, with last admission at 16:30, and closes at weekends, on public holidays, and during the university's summer shutdown. Buses from Kumamoto Station reach the campus in about eight minutes at the Daigaku Byōin-mae stop; the A-line tram towards Kengun-machi leaves you at Miso Tenjin-mae, five minutes on foot.

Kumamoto University's Kurokami campus, a separate site to the north, holds three Important Cultural Properties from the Fifth Higher Middle School of 1889, including the main hall that Natsume Sōseki knew as a teacher. Taken together the two campuses give an unusually complete view of how a Japanese provincial university accumulated its buildings.

One current caution. The earthquake of 28 July 2026, magnitude 7.1, was centred south of the city, and Kumamoto University Hospital took in patients transferred from harder-hit hospitals in the days that followed. No damage to this registered building has been reported. Campus access and museum schedules may still be affected, so confirm before you go.