Shōwa
Kyoto · 昭和Browse Kyoto’s cultural heritage from the Shōwa period (1926 – 1989). Filter by type and keyword, with concise stories, maps, and travel tips.
On the east of Heian Jingu's south court, the East Gate, or Senseimon, and its 50-meter corridor enclose the court, their vermilion frame and green lattice defining it.
Heian Jingu's South Walkway is a 1940 L-shaped passage tying the Soryuro and Byakkoro towers to the outer corridors, two bays wide with a latticed central wall.
A bracket-roofed service gate and 28 metres of tiled wall enclose the west side of the Yamamoto property in Kyoto. Registered in 2007; viewable from the back lane.
A two-storey wooden house of about 1940 in Kamigyo Ward, Kyoto, holding an Art Deco reception room inside a plain Japanese exterior. Registered 2007; still lived in.
A timber gate 1.8 metres wide and 19 metres of tiled wall front the Yamamoto property in Kyoto, registered in 2007 and freely visible from the street at any hour.
An ink inscription inside this 20-square-metre storehouse in Kyoto records a ridge-raising in 1940, supplying the only firm date for the Yamamoto property.
Built in 1942 so the Konoe archive could be examined properly: a 393 m2 sukiya villa with the tea room Tekian, and the one Yomei Bunko building visitors enter.
The plainest of Yomei Bunko's four registered buildings, and the one that works: a 159 m2 wooden office with entrance lattice and a fireplace chimney.
Konoe Fumimaro raised this 73 m2 vault in 1938, before founding the archive itself: reinforced concrete disguised as a merchant's storehouse, lifted off the damp ground.
Two years after the First Repository, wartime shortages forced this 1940 vault to give up its raised floor. Its upper storey is where the treasures are shown.
Standing along Kyoto's celebrated Philosopher's Path near Ginkaku-ji, Restaurant Noa Noa occupies the former Western-style annex of the residence of Hashimoto Kansetsu (1883–1945), one of the leading Japanese-style painters of the Taisho and early Showa eras. Designed by Kansetsu himself and built around 1929 within his sprawling Hakusasonso estate, the modest two-storey reinforced-concrete building was conceived as a place to display his collection of Western antiquities. Its Spanish-style façade — graced with subtly Japanese rafter-shaped detailing on the entrance eaves — embodies a distinctive current of early-Showa residential design, and the property was registered as a Tangible Cultural Property of Japan in 2005. Now serving European cuisine in the painter's original interiors and a leafy garden setting, Noa Noa offers visitors a uniquely atmospheric way to encounter a registered cultural property in the heart of eastern Kyoto.
The Kamowakeikazuchi Shrine Documents, designated as an Important Cultural Property, comprise 13,639 historical records spanning from the late Heian period to the Edo era. Preserved at Kamigamo Shrine in Kyoto, this extraordinary archive includes decrees from Minamoto no Yoritomo, edicts from Oda Nobunaga and Toyotomi Hideyoshi, and approximately 1,400 consecutive monthly financial records—offering an unparalleled window into the history of one of Japan's most revered Shinto shrines.