Yomei Bunko Office

Yōmei Bunko Jimusho: The Building With the Chimney

Three of the four registered buildings at Yōmei Bunko have an obvious claim on your attention. Two are vaults holding one of the great private archives of Japan. One is a sukiya villa with a tea room in it.

The fourth is an office. Wooden, single storey, 159 square metres, tiled roof, standing in a row with the two repositories on a hillside at Utano in northwestern Kyoto. The Agency for Cultural Affairs calls its design and composition plain, and the word is fair. Nothing about the massing announces itself.

Then the same entry lists what is distinctive about it: a lattice motif around the entrance, and a chimney for a fireplace.

A fireplace. In Kyoto. In 1938. In the working building of a court family's archive.

Neither Western Nor Japanese, on Purpose

The Agency's assessment ends with a phrase worth quoting for its precision: taken as a whole, the design is distinctive in being neither quite Western nor quite Japanese.

That sentence would have been an insult in 1900 and a compliment by 1960. In 1938 it was simply where a certain kind of Japanese architect lived. The eclectic buildings of the Meiji period had tended to be Western frames wearing Japanese ornament or the reverse, the two languages visibly stitched together. What Hasebe Eikichi (1885–1960) put on this hillside is not stitched. It reads as one thing that happens to be legible in two directions at once.

Look at the two elements the Agency singles out. The lattice at the entrance is Japanese, or at least it belongs to a vocabulary anyone who has walked a Kyoto street recognises instantly, the kōshi screens fronting townhouses from one end of the city to the other. The chimney is not. A Japanese building of this period heated itself with braziers and, later, stoves; a hearth you build a masonry flue for is an import, and a fairly deliberate one. Neither element is a quotation. They simply coexist, and the building does not appear to find this a problem.

Hasebe's own career explains some of the ease. He graduated from Tokyo Imperial University, spent his working life in the building division of the Sumitomo conglomerate, and in 1933 walked out with Takekoshi Kenzō and twenty-seven colleagues to found the Hasebe Takekoshi Architectural Office, which became Nikken Sekkei. His signature works are corporate and unmistakably modern: the Sumitomo Building in Osaka, the Nippon Life headquarters, the Osaka Securities Exchange. He also designed St. Mary's Cathedral in Osaka and the Sen-oku Hakukokan museum. A man who could do a banking hall and a cathedral and a museum of ancient bronzes was not going to be troubled by a small wooden office that needed to look like it belonged next to a concrete storehouse.

He designed all four buildings here. The office is the one where you can see him relax.

What the Office Is For

The Konoe family heads the gosekke, the five houses from which imperial regents were drawn, and for something close to a thousand years its members held the highest offices at court. That work produced paper, and a house rule forbade dispersing any of it. What came down to the twentieth century runs past a hundred thousand items: diaries of court ritual, letters, accounts, poem sheets, eight National Treasures and around sixty Important Cultural Properties, with Fujiwara no Michinaga's autograph Midō Kanpakuki at the centre.

Konoe Fumimaro, prime minister and the twenty-ninth head of the house, founded the Yōmei Bunko Foundation in November 1938 to keep all of it together. In his prospectus he argued that what had been one family's hoard should become the common treasure of the realm, and that scholars should be able to open the vault and use it.

That last clause is what the office building is for. An archive nobody consults is a warehouse. Somebody has to catalogue a hundred thousand documents, receive the researchers, run the foundation, answer the letters. The repositories next door are sealed boxes with humidity control; you cannot spread a scroll out in one and take notes for six hours. The archive's own account of its compound lists two repositories, an office block, and a reading and assembly hall, and the office is where the institution actually operates. Its 159 square metres are twice the footprint of the First Repository and roughly the same as both vaults combined.

Which may be the real reason for the chimney. A Kyoto winter in a wooden building is genuinely cold, and a scholar sitting still over a thousand-year-old diary is not generating much heat.

A Date That Does Not Quite Agree

There is a small discrepancy in the record here, and it is worth naming rather than smoothing over.

The Agency for Cultural Affairs gives the office's construction date as 1938, the same year as the First Repository. Yōmei Bunko's own history of itself tells the sequence differently: Konoe built one repository first and launched the foundation in November 1938, and then, it says, the office block and the second repository followed in 1939 and 1940. The Agency's date for the Second Repository is 1940, which matches. Its date for the office does not.

The Agency's database is the authoritative source for a registration record and its date is the one given in the basic information below. Whether the discrepancy reflects the gap between when a building was designed, when it was framed, and when it was finished, or simply how the foundation remembered its own opening years, the record does not say.

The registration itself is unambiguous. The office was entered on the register of Tangible Cultural Properties on 9 October 1998, announced on 26 October, as number 26-0029, under the criterion of being a model of design. It falls between the Second Repository at 26-0028 and the Kozansō villa at 26-0030, so the four buildings went onto the register in construction order, as a set.

Registration is the lighter of Japan's two heritage instruments. Introduced in 1996 to address the enormous stock of buildings from the Meiji period onward that were disappearing faster than they could be assessed, it records a building and requires notification before major alteration, without the tight restrictions that come with designation as an Important Cultural Property or National Treasure. For a building still in daily use as an office, that distinction is not academic.

Yōmei Bunko receives visitors on guided tours in two seasons, roughly March to May and September to November, by telephone booking, for parties of twenty or more, from ¥1,500 per person. The tour covers the exhibition inside the repository and the Kozansō villa; the office is a workplace, and you will see it from the outside. Look for the lattice, and then look up for the chimney.