Former Yamamoto Junior High School Kinehara Campus, Administration and Classroom Building

The South Wing of a School the Village Built Itself

The Former Yamamoto Junior High School Kinehara Campus Administration and Classroom Building (旧山本中学校杵原校舎管理教室棟, also romanised Kyū-Yamamoto Chūgakkō Kinehara Kōsha Kanri-Kyōshitsu-tō) is a single-storey wooden school building at 377-1 Takesa, Iida City, Nagano Prefecture, completed in 1949 and entered on Japan's national register of Tangible Cultural Properties on 26 December 2005.

It is an east-west range standing toward the northern part of the grounds, and the southern of the two long wings that local people simply call Kinehara Gakkō. The Agency for Cultural Affairs records its length as 35 ken and its depth as a little over 5 ken. A ken is the interval between structural posts, about 1.82 metres, which puts the frontage at roughly 64 metres. The registered floor area is 609 square metres.

The roof is a plain gable finished in sangawara, the wavy clay pantiles that cover ordinary houses across rural Japan. At the centre of the south elevation a hipped porch steps forward to mark the main entrance, and that small change of roof shape is the one piece of ceremony the building allows itself.

The walls outside are clapboard, shitami-ita-bari, each horizontal board lapped over the one below. Above the window line runs a narrow band of white plaster. Inside, the upper wall is plastered white and the lower portion is faced with vertical boarding, while classrooms and corridor alike are covered by sao-buchi ceilings, flat boards carried on slender exposed battens.

Registered Rather Than Designated, and Why That Matters

Japan protects historic buildings through two separate mechanisms, and the difference is worth understanding before visiting. Designation (shitei) applies to a small number of structures judged to be of the highest national importance, and it brings strict controls on any alteration. Registration (tōroku), created by a 1996 amendment to the Law for the Protection of Cultural Properties, is a lighter arrangement aimed at buildings around fifty years old or more. It works by keeping them in everyday use instead of freezing them as museum pieces. Kinehara belongs to the second category, under registration number 20-0234 for this south wing and 20-0235 for the north wing, both entered in the forty-eighth round of registrations.

The stated ground is the first of the registration criteria: a structure contributing to the historical landscape of the nation. Iida City records that these two wings, along with the schoolhouse of Otemachi Elementary School in the centre of the city, were the first compulsory-education school buildings in Nagano Prefecture to be registered. Regional reporting goes further, describing Kinehara as the first schoolhouse of the postwar shinsei chūgakkō system, the new-model junior high school, to be registered anywhere in the country.

None of that explains how the building got built.

The 1947 education reform replaced the prewar system with the six-three-three-four ladder familiar today, and it obliged every municipality to provide three years of junior high schooling. Yamamoto Village passed the construction resolution in 1948, at a moment when the country had almost no money and very little material. Most of the site was handed over without payment. Households contributed straw, bamboo and rope, and their own labour. Timber from shrine groves and district woodland was sold to raise cash, the women's association bred rabbits for the same purpose, and pupils carried materials up to the site themselves. The school opened in August 1949.

Look at the wainscot inside the entrance hall and you will find plywood where solid boarding would normally be. It is a small, honest record of what a village could and could not obtain four years after the war.

What a Visitor Actually Sees

Yamamoto Junior High School sent out 3,515 graduates over thirty-eight years before merging with Igara Junior High School, now Asahigaoka Junior High School, in 1985. The buildings were left standing. In 2005, the year of registration, sixty local residents formed a volunteer body called the Kinehara Gakkō Ōendan and reopened the site under the old place name, and they have run it since.

The exterior can be looked at freely at any time of day, and there is a car park on site. Interior access is the part that needs planning. The classrooms are opened during the cherry blossom season, generally for ten to fifteen days from the start of flowering, and at intervals through the year for the volunteer group's own programmes, so a visit outside those windows will be an outdoor one.

Standing in front of the porch, the wooded ridge of Takadoya-yama, 1,398 metres, closes the view to the south. The weeping cherry on the lawn in front of the wing is the reason most Japanese visitors come. Its age is given variously as around eighty years and around one hundred, which by the standards of famous Japanese cherry trees makes it a youngster, and the pale pink canopy spreads sideways rather than upward, level with the eaves.

Film crews found the place early. Yamada Yōji shot part of Kaabee (母べえ, released January 2008) in these classrooms and came back in 2015 for Haha to Kuraseba (母と暮せば), both starring Yoshinaga Sayuri. One room has been kept as it was left after filming, and the blackboard is said to still carry Yoshinaga's writing, a date of 8 December and the words of an old school song. Yamada, impressed by residents keeping an old building alive through use, accepted the title of honorary principal.

Photographing the exterior is not restricted in practice, and the spring festival in early April is built around photography: the classrooms open in the evening and the cherry is floodlit, so the tree can be framed through the wooden window sashes. Inside the building, follow whatever guidance the volunteers give on the day.

By public transport, take the Shinnan Kōtsū wide-area bus on the Komaba line and get off at Yamamoto Jichi Shinkō Center-mae, about ten minutes on foot from the school.