Taishō

Built in 1924 to replace a wooden school lost to fire, this three-storey concrete building by ministry engineer Nagaoka Yue carries Secession-style capitals.

This 1921 storehouse in Yatsushiro shows exposed brick at street level and timber-framed brick above, rendered in mortar to imitate a traditional plastered kura.

The convent brick wall of the Sisters of Saint Paul of Chartres in Yatsushiro, built in 1919, runs 21 metres along the street with pilasters and a brick coping.

A late Taisho wall of black plaster over checkered brick at the Kashiwabara house in Ogawa, Uki City, repaired after the 2016 Kumamoto quakes and registered in 2021.

A tall two-storey retirement house of 1922 behind the Kashiwabara main house in Ogawa, Uki City, with alcoves, desk niches and osa-ranma transoms of Taisho craft.

A Taisho-era yakuimon gate and 12-metre plastered wall on a washed artificial-stone base, marking the guests' way into the Kashiwabara merchant house in Ogawa.

The Nagasaki Jiro Bookstore of 1924 in the old merchant quarter of Kumamoto, a brick-clad building with arches upstairs, is one of the city's oldest bookshops.

The Hayano Building in Kumamoto, a concrete office block of 1924 said to be the first built for rent in the city, shows early office design in its windows.

On the Tsuboi River by the stone Meiju Bridge stands the 1919 Dai-Ichi Bank Kumamoto Branch, the city's first concrete building, designed by Yoshitoki Nishimura.

In Miyahara, Kumamoto, a 20-meter red brick wall in English bond edges the old Iseri merchant estate. Its even buttresses and capping cornice show late-Taisho craft.

A small 1925 concrete bank in Miyahara, an old Kumamoto post town. Its Secession-style front carries four pilasters and a geometric parapet, and entry is free.

Built in 1925 to carry carts over the Koshi River, Himeibashi in Kikuchi, Kumamoto, is Japan's earliest surviving through-type reinforced concrete arch bridge.

Taisho-era wall of Aso welded tuff in Kikuchi, Kumamoto. Coursed nunozumi masonry, trapezoidal in section, 46 metres long, once nearly twice its present height.

A Taisho farmhouse in Kikuchi, Kumamoto, registered in 2013: timber from the family's own hillside, heavy beams over the doma, transoms carved with Aso's peaks.

Former Yasuda Bank branch of 1925 in Yamaga, Kumamoto, with an Ionic-style historicist front, now a museum of Yamaga lanterns made only of washi paper and glue.

Registered in 2013, this early Taisho two-storey block at Yoshino Ryokan in Hitoyoshi, Kumamoto, began as a bathhouse and keeps lath windows and coloured glass.