Nagano Prefecture Matsumoto Fukashi High School Administration and Classroom Building

A Concrete Schoolhouse Finished in 1933

The Administration and Classroom Building of Nagano Prefectural Matsumoto Fukashi High School (長野県松本深志高等学校管理普通教室棟, Nagano-ken Matsumoto Fukashi Kōtō Gakkō Kanri Futsū Kyōshitsu-tō) stands at 3-8-1 Arigasaki in Matsumoto City, Nagano Prefecture, was completed in 1933, and was entered on the national register of Tangible Cultural Properties on 18 March 2003. Students and graduates rarely use that mouthful of a name. They call it Ittō (一棟), Building One.

The school behind the building is older than the building by well over half a century. In July 1876 a preparatory middle school was opened inside the Kaichi School with fifty pupils on the roll. That founding classroom survives today as the Former Kaichi School Building, designated a National Treasure in 2019 and roughly a ten-minute walk from the present campus. The middle school moved several times before settling, in 1885, into new quarters in the second bailey of Matsumoto Castle.

By the early 1930s the castle grounds had become an awkward home for a school of several hundred boys. Work on a replacement campus began on the Arigasaki slope in November 1932. The classroom building went up first, in 1933; the auditorium followed in 1934; the move was finally completed on 22 July 1935, and the school marked both its fiftieth anniversary and the new campus with a joint ceremony the following year.

The design came from the building maintenance section of the Nagano prefectural government rather than from a private architect. What that office produced is a three-storey reinforced concrete block with a building area of 2,579 square metres, holding the principal's office, the staff room and the general office at its centre and ordinary classrooms along its wings. The compound name, awkward in translation, simply lists those two functions.

Why the Building Was Registered

Registration came in the thirty-sixth round of the national register, under register number 20-0127. The Agency for Cultural Affairs recorded the decision on 18 March 2003 and promulgated it on 8 April, which is why published sources sometimes give one date and sometimes the other. The criterion applied was the first of the three available: that the building is a model of its type of design.

The Agency's own summary puts the case in two lines. This is an early example of reinforced concrete school architecture in Nagano Prefecture, and its exterior carries a Gothic flavour: a gentle pointed arch over the central entrance porch, pilasters that rise unbroken through the second and third floors and taper to points at the top, and a skin of scratch tile over the whole.

Scratch tile deserves a word of explanation for readers outside Japan. The finish is a clay tile whose face has been dragged with a comb before firing, leaving shallow vertical grooves that catch light and shadow. It spread rapidly through Japanese public architecture in the 1920s and 1930s, and by 1933 it read as the correct, sober material for an institution that wanted to look permanent.

The Agency also records a piece of oral tradition: the Yasuda Auditorium of Tokyo Imperial University is said to have been the model. That building, completed in 1925, gave interwar Japan a vocabulary of pointed arches and vertical piers in reinforced concrete, and prefectural offices around the country borrowed from it. The claim is transmitted rather than documented, and the Agency phrases it as such.

Recognition arrived earlier than registration did. In December 1982 the Architectural Institute of Japan included Building One in a national shortlist of roughly two thousand significant modern buildings drawn from some thirteen thousand surveyed, two decades before the Agency's decision.

One distinction matters here. A registered Tangible Cultural Property is not an Important Cultural Property, and it is certainly not a National Treasure. Registration is the lightest of the three tiers, created in 1996 for buildings over fifty years old that remain in everyday use; owners notify the government before altering the exterior, but the regime is designed to keep such buildings working rather than to freeze them. That is exactly what has happened here.

What to Look For, and How to See It

Approach from the front gate and the building reveals itself gradually, because the ground rises. The porch arch arrives at eye level; the pilasters carry the eye upward; the scratch tile changes character with the hour, flat and grey at noon, deeply ribbed in low afternoon light. Photographers who care about that texture should come late in the day.

Inside, the corridors of Building One are finished in plaster above a darker floor, and the contrast is the detail current students name first when they describe the place. A telescope dome sits on the roof, the highest point on the campus; from that level the Matsumoto basin opens out, with the Northern Alps to the west and Matsumoto Castle visible below to the south.

Now the practical part, and it is the part most visitors get wrong.

This is a working high school with around nine hundred students, not a museum. The interior is not open for casual sightseeing at any time during the school year, and there is no ticket office, no admission fee and no visitor entrance. Anyone with a scholarly or professional reason to go inside should write to the school office in advance on 0263-32-0003; permission is granted at the school's discretion and is not routine.

The realistic opportunity is the Tombo Festival (とんぼ祭), the student-run school festival held in early July, which includes public open days. The seventy-ninth edition ran on 11 and 12 July 2026, with public hours of 9:30 to 15:30 on the Saturday and 9:30 to 16:30 on the Sunday. Visitors are asked to bring indoor shoes and a bag for their outdoor pair, since Japanese schools do not allow street shoes past the entrance hall. There is no visitor parking whatsoever; come on foot, by bicycle or by public transport. Dates shift each year, so check the festival page before travelling.

Photographing the exterior from the public road is unproblematic at any time. During the festival, follow staff instructions and do not photograph students without asking.

Getting there on foot: about 1.6 kilometres, or twenty-one minutes, from Kita-Matsumoto Station on the JR Ōito Line, and about 2.0 kilometres, or twenty-seven minutes, from Matsumoto Station. The walk is uphill at the end. Two other buildings sit within easy reach of the same route: the Former Kaichi School Building, the National Treasure where this school began, about ten minutes away and open daily from 9:00 to 16:30, and Matsumoto Castle roughly a kilometre to the south. Anyone tracing school architecture across three eras can add the Former Matsumoto Higher School, an Important Cultural Property in timber of 1920, further to the southeast.