Yomei Bunko Daini Bunko

Yōmei Bunko Daini Bunko: The Building Where the War Shows

The Second Repository at Yōmei Bunko was finished in 1940. Its older sibling, standing a few metres away, was finished in 1938. Same architect. Same master carpenter. Same client. Same job, which was to keep a thousand years of Konoe family paperwork from burning, shaking apart, or growing mould.

They are not the same building, and the reasons are worth reading slowly.

The First Repository is a single storey, 73 square metres, standing on a raised floor with air moving beneath it. The Second is two storeys, 121 square metres, and the open underfloor was given up. The Agency for Cultural Affairs states the reason without ornament: severe conditions in the supply of materials. In two years, the drawings had changed because Japan had changed.

This is a registered cultural property whose listing quietly records a shortage.

What Was Being Protected, and From What

To understand why the compromise mattered, you have to know what was going into the box.

The Konoe family heads the gosekke, the five houses from which Japan's imperial regents were drawn. For roughly a millennium its members occupied the highest offices at court, and the work of those offices produced paper: diaries of ritual and precedent, correspondence, household accounts, poem sheets, copies of other families' books. A house rule forbade dispersing any of it. The result, by the twentieth century, was something in the range of a hundred thousand items and more, including eight National Treasures and around sixty Important Cultural Properties. The centrepiece is the Midō Kanpakuki, the diary Fujiwara no Michinaga wrote in his own hand at the peak of Fujiwara ascendancy in the early eleventh century, still held by his direct descendants and inscribed on UNESCO's Memory of the World register.

The threats were specific and had already struck. In 1466, with the Ōnin War about to break, fifty boxes of diaries were carried out of Kyoto to a temple in the northern hills; the Konoe mansion burned the following year and the records did not. In 1675 fire reached the family's storehouse in the capital, and five retainers went in and hauled out more than half the books and heirlooms before it took them. Hundreds of hanging scrolls were lost. Other regent houses were less fortunate: the Nijō family's archive burned in the same period, and nothing comparable survives from it.

Konoe Fumimaro, prime minister and twenty-ninth head of the house, was building against that record. The First Repository went up in 1938, and he founded the Yōmei Bunko Foundation that November. The office building and the Second Repository followed. By the time material for the second vault was being ordered, the country had been at full-scale war in China for three years, and steel, cement and timber were all going somewhere else.

The Compromise, and What Survived It

Hasebe Eikichi (1885–1960) designed both repositories, with Matano Chūzō as master carpenter. Hasebe had come up through Sumitomo's building division and in 1933 co-founded the practice that became Nikken Sekkei; his usual work was steel-framed office buildings in Osaka. At Yōmei Bunko he was doing something else: reinforced concrete dressed as a dozō, the thick-walled storehouse of merchant Japan, under a clay tile roof.

The raised floor was not decoration. Kyoto is humid, concrete holds moisture, and lifting a vault clear of the ground so air can circulate beneath it is one of the oldest answers in the Japanese repertoire, older than concrete and older than the storehouse itself. Raised granaries were doing it in the Yayoi period. The First Repository got it. The Second did not, and the specifications diverged accordingly.

What did not get abandoned is the interesting part. The Agency's account confirms that the Second Repository was still built with humidity control, earthquake resistance and fire resistance in view. The two storeys are themselves a response to constraint: more capacity for the same ground, at a moment when ground was the cheapest thing available and material was not. Denied one solution, the design went looking for others.

Registration followed on 9 October 1998, announced on the 26th of that month, under registration number 26-0028. The criterion cited is that the building is a model of design. Registration, introduced in 1996, is the lighter of Japan's two heritage instruments, distinct from the designation that produces National Treasures and Important Cultural Properties. It records, it requires notification of major alteration, and it leaves the owner room to keep using the building. All four structures at Yōmei Bunko carry consecutive numbers, 26-0027 through 26-0030, entered in the order they were raised.

The Room on the Second Floor

Here is the reason this building matters to a visitor rather than only to an architectural historian.

The upper storey of the Second Repository holds the exhibition room. When Yōmei Bunko receives guests, this is where the treasures come out. Not in a purpose-built gallery, not in a museum wing added later, but on the first floor of a wartime concrete vault, up inside the object that was built to keep those documents alive in the first place.

Recent exhibitions have put the Midō Kanpakuki on display alongside other National Treasures from the collection, including the Wakanshō, the Ruijū Utaawase and the ten-volume Utaawase. Michinaga's handwriting, in the building designed to outlast it.

Access is by arrangement. Yōmei Bunko is a working research archive and does not admit casual visitors. Guided tours run in two seasons, roughly March to May and September to November, booked by telephone, for parties of twenty or more, with a fee starting at ¥1,500 per person. A visit takes in the exhibition inside the repository and the sukiya-style Kozansō villa nearby. Photography indoors is not allowed.

If you get there, stand between the two vaults before you go up. Two boxes, two years apart, one designer, one carpenter, one purpose. One of them has air under its floor and one of them does not, and the reason is written into a government database in the flattest possible language. The compound sits a short walk uphill from Ninna-ji, behind trees, and the visitors streaming through the temple gate below have no particular reason to know it is there.