Former Yamamoto Junior High School Kinehara Campus, Classroom Building

Seven Classrooms in a Row

The Former Yamamoto Junior High School Kinehara Campus Classroom Building (旧山本中学校杵原校舎教室棟, also romanised Kyū-Yamamoto Chūgakkō Kinehara Kōsha 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 the northern of the two parallel wings on the site, known locally as the north building of Kinehara Gakkō, and it exists for one purpose. Seven classrooms sit side by side along its length, each measuring 5 ken by 4 ken. A ken is the spacing between structural posts, roughly 1.82 metres, so a room comes out at about 9.1 by 7.3 metres, some 66 square metres of floor for a class of postwar village children.

A corridor 7.5 shaku wide, about 2.25 metres, runs the full length on the north side. At the east and west ends, covered walkways cross the gap to the Administration and Classroom Building, the south wing, so the two ranges form a long open rectangle with the schoolyard between them.

The Agency for Cultural Affairs describes this wing as being of the same scale as the south wing. The registered floor areas differ: 768 square metres here against 609 for the south. Both are recorded as 35 ken along the ridge with a depth of a little over 5 ken, single-storey timber construction under a gabled roof of sangawara pantiles.

Windows as the Argument for Preservation

The reason this building carries a registration comes down largely to its windows. Along the outer wall, sliding glazed sashes are set in groups of three, each group topped by a ramma, the openwork transom panel above a Japanese sliding fitting, which admits light and moving air above head height while the sashes below are shut. On the partition between classroom and corridor the same sliding windows appear without the transom. Iida City puts it plainly: clapboard walls with a continuous run of sliding glass windows preserve the appearance of a provincial school building of the period, and that appearance is what contributes to the historical landscape of the nation.

That phrase is the first of the three criteria used for registration. Registration (tōroku) and designation (shitei) are separate systems in Japan. Designation covers a small number of buildings of the highest national importance and controls change tightly; registration, introduced by a 1996 amendment to the Law for the Protection of Cultural Properties, applies to buildings of roughly fifty years and older and protects them by keeping them in use. This wing was registered under number 20-0235 and the south wing under 20-0234, both in the forty-eighth round. Iida City records that the pair, along with the schoolhouse of Otemachi Elementary School, were the first compulsory-education school buildings in Nagano Prefecture to be registered, and regional reporting describes Kinehara as the first postwar new-system junior high school building registered anywhere in Japan.

Seven classrooms was not an arbitrary number. Japan's 1947 education reform installed the six-three-three-four ladder still in place today and made three years of junior high school compulsory, which left thousands of rural municipalities suddenly obliged to house pupils they had never taught before. Yamamoto Village voted for construction in 1948 and put up these buildings with donated land, donated straw and bamboo and rope, timber sold from shrine and district woodland, funds raised by the women's association keeping rabbits, and labour supplied by villagers and pupils alike. The school opened in August 1949 and closed in 1985, having graduated 3,515 students in thirty-eight years, when it merged with Igara Junior High School, now Asahigaoka Junior High School.

Inside the North Building

The classrooms now hold displays of local folk materials, and the north wing also keeps a scale model of the school buildings, donated by Kanazawa Susumu, a man from the Yamamoto district. Looking at the model and then down the real corridor gives an unusually clear sense of how the two ranges and their linking walkways were planned.

Late afternoon is when the corridor earns its keep. The wooden sash frames throw long shadows across floorboards worn smooth by thirty-eight years of pupils, and the light comes through in bands the width of the window groupings.

Access needs a little planning. The exterior can be seen freely at any time and there is a car park, but the interior opens only during the cherry blossom period, generally for ten to fifteen days from the start of flowering, and for the programmes run through the year by the Kinehara Gakkō Ōendan, a volunteer body of local residents formed in 2005 to take the buildings on.

The Kinehara Gakkō spring festival in early April is the most reliable opportunity. Both wings open, the classrooms are unlocked in the evening, and the weeping cherry in front of the south wing is floodlit, so it can be photographed through the wooden sashes from inside. The tree's age is given as around eighty years in some accounts and around a hundred in others, young for a celebrated Japanese cherry; its branches spread sideways at eaves height rather than climbing.

These classrooms have also appeared on screen. Yamada Yōji filmed Kaabee (母べえ, released January 2008) at Kinehara and returned in 2015 for Haha to Kuraseba (母と暮せば), and one room has been kept as the crew left it. The director accepted the position of honorary principal of the school.

By bus, take the Shinnan Kōtsū wide-area service on the Komaba line to Yamamoto Jichi Shinkō Center-mae and walk about ten minutes. The ridge of Takadoya-yama, 1,398 metres, rises beyond the grounds.