Nagano Prefecture Minamiazumi Agricultural High School

A Round Building in a School Field

The Nichirinsha (日輪舎) of the Second Farm of Nagano Prefectural Minami-Azumi Agricultural High School is a circular two-storey timber building at 1773-2 Horigane Karasugawa, Azumino City, Nagano Prefecture, completed in 1945 and entered on the national register of Tangible Cultural Properties on 28 April 2009. It is roughly thirteen metres in diameter, with a conical roof, and is owned by Nagano Prefecture.

Round buildings are rare in Japanese vernacular architecture, and this one is round for a specific historical reason rather than an aesthetic one.

The form derives from the nichirin-heisha, the circular dormitory blocks built at the Uchihara Training Centre in what is now Mito City, Ibaraki Prefecture. From 1938 the centre trained adolescent boys, most of them between fifteen and nineteen, for the Manchuria and Mongolia Development Youth Volunteer Corps, the programme that sent young Japanese to settle in the puppet state of Manchukuo. The buildings were designed by the architect Koga Hiroto. A standard block was about thirty-six shaku across, close to eleven metres, and slept roughly sixty. Because the design assumed the trainees themselves would put them up, the structure was reduced to parts simple enough for amateurs, and a single block could reportedly be raised in a day. By the end of the war some 347 of them stood at Uchihara.

The circle carried meaning as well as economy. Nichirin means sun disc, and the association with the emperor and with the imperial ideology behind the settlement programme was made explicitly at the time. The shape also recalled the Mongolian ger, which fitted the continental ambitions the training served.

Why the Azumino Building Is Called Nichirinsha and Not Nichirin-heisha

The design spread. It appeared in magazines with construction instructions, in newsreels, in novels, and versions of it went up at agricultural schools and training farms across Japan. Where the building was not a military barracks, the second character was dropped: nichirin-sha, sun-disc hall, rather than sun-disc barracks.

Minami-Azumi Agricultural School, as it was then called, had been founded in 1920 with departments of agriculture and sericulture. Its Nichirinsha was built as a residential study hall for its own students. Local accounts record that a benefactor in the former village of Ariake contributed funds, that a shrine carpenter from Toyoshina carried out the work, and that students hauled stone up from the riverbed. Construction began in 1943 and stalled for want of materials; the building was finished in May 1945, three months before the war ended.

This is where the building's registration becomes worth thinking about. Nagano sent more settlers to Manchuria than any other prefecture, well over thirty thousand people, including more than six thousand in the youth corps. Recruitment ran through schools, and the prefectural teachers' association was pressed into meeting quotas. Losses among settlers were severe, and the aftermath included the stranded women and orphaned children whose repatriation continued for decades. The Manmo Kaitaku Peace Memorial Museum in Achi Village, opened in 2013, is the only museum in Japan devoted to that history.

The Agency for Cultural Affairs registered the Nichirinsha under the criterion of being a model of design (造形の規範となっているもの), and its formal statement addresses only the architecture: the circular plan, the conical roof, the scarcity of surviving examples nationally. The surrounding history is not in the citation. It is, however, the reason the building has the shape it has.

What Survives, and How to See It

The exterior walls are clapboard, laid horizontally around the drum. The eaves soffit is boarded, and the entrance has a small canopy carried on plain brackets, without carving. Wide windows are set around the full circumference, which is how a building with no rear wall and no obvious front solves the problem of daylight. The roof is now covered in sheet metal. Total building area is 139 square metres over two floors.

Comparable buildings elsewhere had a central earth-floored space with boarded platforms ringing it on both levels, an arrangement that let a large group sleep and study in one room. The Agency for Cultural Affairs record does not say that the Azumino building retains that plan, and it should not be assumed to.

Access requires care. The Nichirinsha stands inside the working Second Farm of an operating prefectural high school. Parts of the site are posted against entry, and the building is not an open visitor attraction. There is a sign on the road indicating the Nichirinsha, and visitors have viewed the exterior from the farm road; anyone wanting to go further should contact the school in advance rather than assume permission. The main campus of Minami-Azumi Agricultural High School is at 4537 Toyoshina, Azumino City, some distance from the farm. The farm itself is around fifty minutes on foot from Toyoshina Station, so a car or taxi is the practical option. The Alps Azumino National Government Park at Horigane is close by, and the Manmo Kaitaku Peace Memorial Museum, though far to the south in Achi Village, is the place to go for the history the building belongs to.