Former Konoike Bank Shichijo Branch

A Small Bank on a Street That Used to Be the Front Door of Kyoto

The Former Konoike Bank Shichijo Branch (旧鴻池銀行七条支店, also written Kyū Kōnoike Ginkō Shichijō Shiten) faces Shichijo-dori in Shimogyo Ward, Kyoto City, was completed in 1927, and was entered on the national register of Tangible Cultural Properties on 2 May 2017.

It is not a large building. Two storeys with a partial third and a partial basement, reinforced concrete, a building area of 164 square metres. On a street of larger neighbours it would disappear. Shichijo-dori is not that street.

Kyoto's first railway station opened on this thoroughfare in 1877, and for the following half-century Shichijo was where the city met arriving travellers. Banks, offices and government buildings accumulated along it. Several survive within a few minutes' walk: the Former Murai Bank Shichijo Branch, the Former Fuji Rabbit motor showroom with its automobile stained glass, the Nishi Honganji Dendoin, the main hall of Ryukoku University. Walking the strip is the best way to understand why a bank of this size was worth building in brick-thick concrete and dressing with this much care.

The Konoike name carried weight. The bank descended from the Konoike house of Osaka money changers, whose business reached back to the Edo period, and through a chain of postwar mergers its corporate line runs to what is now MUFG Bank.

Romanesque at the Wall, Geometry at the Details

The Agency for Cultural Affairs assessment reads almost as a close description, and it is worth following item by item because each element is visible from the pavement.

Tall arched windows are ranged across the south front. Quoins are expressed at the corners. Along the top of the wall runs a Lombard band, the row of small blind arches that gives away the Romanesque reference at once. Together these establish the building's basic register: heavy, arcuated, faintly ecclesiastical.

Then the detail contradicts the register. The brackets supporting the entrance canopy carry geometric patterning, and so do the capitals of the interior columns. Geometric ornament of this kind belongs to the 1920s rather than to any historical revival, and the record notes that these areas raise the density of decoration. The building holds two design languages at once and does not try to reconcile them, which is very much a mark of its decade.

Registration was granted under the criterion of being a model of design, and the record describes it as a bank building of the early Shōwa period with an ornamentally rich scheme.

Attribution is a point where sources part company. The Agency for Cultural Affairs record names no architect. Architectural writing on the building consistently credits the design office of Sō Hyōzō, an Osaka practitioner active from Meiji into early Shōwa, with the scheme worked out by Ōkura Saburō, then in that office; construction is generally attributed to Takenaka Corporation. These attributions are reported rather than confirmed by primary record. The Agency's record does note a renovation around 2008.

Getting a Look Inside

The building is privately owned, by Wakabayashi Shoji Co., Ltd., and remains in commercial use. Over the years it has housed a long-running Kyoto café and later a restaurant, and it has operated as a wedding venue. Because the occupant changes, the reliable advice is to check what is currently trading there before planning a visit around going inside.

The exterior is available at any hour and rewards a slow look. Stand back across Shichijo-dori and the arcade of windows resolves into a rhythm; step up to the entrance and the bracket carving comes into focus. Photography from the street is unrestricted. Photography inside depends entirely on the current business, and during private functions it will not be possible.

The site is roughly ten minutes on foot west of Kyoto Station, and Nishi Honganji is a similar distance north. That combination puts the building on a walkable line between two places most visitors already intend to see, which is the practical argument for making the detour.

One caution on dates. Some published accounts give the construction year as 1928. The Agency for Cultural Affairs record gives 1927, and that is the figure used here.