Yomei Bunko Daiichi Bunko

Yōmei Bunko Daiichi Bunko: The Vault That Arrived Before the Archive

Seventy-three square metres. That is the entire building footprint of the First Repository at Yōmei Bunko, a single-storey structure raised in 1938 on a wooded slope at Utano, on the northwestern rim of Kyoto. It went up before anything else on the site.

Konoe Fumimaro, prime minister of Japan at the time and twenty-ninth head of the Konoe family, had this one vault built, moved his family's most valuable records down from Tokyo into it, and only then, in November of that year, launched the Yōmei Bunko Foundation. The collection had a roof over it before the institution had a charter.

What the Konoe had to house was not a library in the ordinary sense. The family stands at the head of the gosekke, the five houses from which regents to the emperor were drawn for the better part of eight centuries, and its business was paperwork: diaries of court ritual, letters, ledgers, poem sheets, kept generation after generation under a house rule forbidding their dispersal. By the twentieth century that accumulation ran past a hundred thousand items. Among them sits the autograph diary of Fujiwara no Michinaga (966–1027), the Midō Kanpakuki, written at the height of Fujiwara power and still in the hands of Michinaga's direct descendants a thousand years later. It is a National Treasure and is inscribed on UNESCO's Memory of the World register. Seven other National Treasures and some sixty Important Cultural Properties keep it company.

All of it needed a box that would not burn, would not shake apart, and would not quietly rot its own contents.

Concrete Wearing the Clothes of a Storehouse

Walk up to the First Repository and the shape reads as familiar: a squat rectangular block under a tiled roof, blank-walled, the silhouette of a dozō, the thick-walled plastered storehouse that stood behind Japanese merchant shops and temple compounds for centuries. Farmers put rice in them. Merchants put ledgers in them. They were the fireproof answer of a country built out of wood and paper.

The resemblance stops at the surface. The Agency for Cultural Affairs records the structure plainly: reinforced concrete, single storey, tile roof. The kura is a costume worn by a modern engineered frame.

That decision was not nostalgia. In 1938 reinforced concrete had already proved itself in Japan as the material that survived the Great Kantō Earthquake of 1923 while brick and timber around it collapsed and burned. For a family whose surviving archive existed only because ancestors had hauled fifty boxes of diaries out of Kyoto ahead of the Ōnin War in 1466, and because five retainers had run into a burning storehouse in 1675 and dragged out more than half the books, the argument for concrete required no elaboration. The Konoe knew exactly what fire did.

The harder problem was slower and less dramatic. Kyoto summers are humid enough to grow mould on a paper scroll in a season, and concrete itself sweats. The Agency's description notes that the building was designed with humidity management in view, given the importance of what it would hold. The archive's own account describes its two repositories as raised-floor construction, the box lifted clear of the ground so that air can move underneath and soil moisture cannot climb into the walls. It is an old trick, older than concrete, older than the storehouse form. Japanese granaries were doing it in the Yayoi period. Hasebe applied it to a poured frame.

The design is credited to Hasebe Eikichi (1885–1960), with Matano Chūzō as master carpenter. The pairing looks odd on a concrete building until you consider what a carpenter was still needed for: the roof structure carrying those tiles, the doors, the interior fittings, the joinery that makes a vault usable rather than merely sealed.

Hasebe himself is a name worth pausing over. A graduate of Tokyo Imperial University, he had spent his career inside the Sumitomo conglomerate's building division, and in 1933 he left with Takekoshi Kenzō and twenty-seven colleagues to found the Hasebe Takekoshi Architectural Office, the firm that eventually became Nikken Sekkei, one of the largest architectural practices in the world. His portfolio runs to the Sumitomo Building in Osaka, the Sen-oku Hakukokan museum, the Nippon Life headquarters, and St. Mary's Cathedral in Osaka. Steel frames. Banking halls. Modern commissions for modern money.

And then a 73-square-metre concrete storehouse in the hills for a court family's paperwork. It is an unexpected line in that résumé, and Yōmei Bunko kept him: he would design every one of the four buildings on the site.

Why It Carries a Registration Number

On 9 October 1998 the First Repository was entered on Japan's register of Tangible Cultural Properties, with the registration announced on 26 October. Its number is 26-0027. The three buildings that followed it on the site took 26-0028, 26-0029 and 26-0030, so the four entered the register together, in the order they were built.

Registration is not the same as designation, and the distinction matters for anyone trying to read a Japanese heritage listing. National Treasure and Important Cultural Property status is designation: heavy protection, tight restrictions, applied to a small number of buildings. The registration system, introduced in 1996, was built for a different problem, namely the enormous stock of buildings from the Meiji period onward that were being demolished faster than anyone could evaluate them. Registration is a lighter instrument. It records a building, requires notification before major alteration, and offers modest support, without freezing the owner's hands.

The First Repository was registered under the criterion of being a model of design, one of the three grounds the system recognises. The judgement being made is architectural rather than sentimental. This is an early, purpose-built archive from the years when Japanese institutions were first working out how to store their own history, and it solves the problem by welding a modern structural system to a building type a thousand years old, without letting the seam show.

There is a second value in it, harder to put on a plaque. The building is the physical form of an argument Konoe Fumimaro made in his founding prospectus for the archive, where he wrote that what had been one family's hoard should now become the common treasure of the realm. Concrete is what that sentence looks like when it is built.

Getting There, and What You Will Actually See

Yōmei Bunko is a working research archive, not a museum, and it behaves like one. The gate is not open to walk-up visitors.

Guided visits run in two windows each year, roughly March to May and September to November. Booking is by telephone, the archive asks for parties of twenty or more, and the fee starts at ¥1,500 per person. A tour takes in an exhibition of collection items in the display room inside the repository building, and the sukiya-style Kozansō villa at the edge of the compound. Photography inside is not permitted.

If you do stand in front of the First Repository, look at it beside its neighbour. The Second Repository went up two years later, doing the same job, by the same designer and the same carpenter, and it is not the same building: two storeys instead of one, 121 square metres instead of 73, and a raised floor abandoned because by 1940 the materials simply were not available. Two years, and the war had already reached into the drawings.

Then look at the roof. Somebody specified clay tiles for a reinforced concrete vault in the woods, on a building almost nobody would ever see, for a client whose own account of his archive is a chronicle of near misses with fire. Nothing about that was necessary. The concrete would have held up fine under something cheaper.

The compound sits close to Ninna-ji, and most people who come to this corner of Kyoto come for the temple. The archive is a few minutes uphill, behind trees, doing quietly what it was put there to do.