Nakazawa Watch Main Store

A Shop That Was Rebuilt Because the Street Moved

Nakazawa Tokei Honten (中澤時計本店, also written Nakazawa Tokei Honten or Nakazawa-tokei), the main store of the Nakazawa clock and watch business, is a two-storey timber commercial building at 48-1 Daimon-cho, Nagano City, Nagano Prefecture, completed in 1924 and entered on the national register of Tangible Cultural Properties on 31 January 2003. It stands on the eastern side of Chuo-dori, the avenue that runs from Nagano Station to the gate of Zenkoji temple.

The building exists in its present form because of a road project. In the Taisho period, Nagano carried out a municipal street reorganisation that widened the approach to Zenkoji. Frontages along the avenue were cut back, and the businesses on them had to rebuild. The Nakazawa family, who had been selling clocks on this street since 1877, took the opportunity to put up something considerably more ambitious than the shop they had lost.

The date deserves a moment. A clock shop trading in Nagano from 1877 predates Hattori Tokeiten, the Ginza firm that grew into Seiko, by four years. Provincial commerce in the early Meiji period is often imagined as a step behind the capital. Here it was not.

Stone That Is Not Stone

Approach from the south and the building reads as masonry: a heavy, flat, greyish façade with crisp geometric detailing, quite unlike the timber shopfronts that once lined the avenue. It is a wooden building. The frame is timber throughout, and the street elevation is finished in arai-dashi, a washed-aggregate render in which the surface is worked back while still green to expose the stone chips within. The Agency for Cultural Affairs records the substrate as wire-reinforced concrete.

The technique had a moment in provincial Japan between the wars. It gave a modest timber structure the weight and permanence of stone at a fraction of the cost, and it depended entirely on the skill of the plasterer, since the finish is achieved by hand at exactly the right stage of curing. The Fujiya Ryokan, another registered building a short walk along the same street, carries the same treatment. Seen together, the two make an argument about what Nagano's merchants wanted the approach to Zenkoji to look like after the widening.

The detailing follows the Vienna Secession, the movement that broke from historicist ornament around 1897 in favour of flat surfaces, restrained geometry, and shallow relief. That vocabulary reached Japan through architectural journals and travelling students, and by the 1920s it had filtered well beyond Tokyo. The designer here was Honda Masazo, an architectural engineer on retainer to Nagano City, and the work was carried out by the master carpenter Ikeda Ichiro.

One further feature is worth locating on site: the north-western corner is chamfered. That cut face turns toward Zenkoji. Corner-cutting was partly a practical response to traffic at a junction, but the orientation is deliberate, and it gives the building an address in relation to the temple rather than only to the street grid. The Agency for Cultural Affairs notes the alignment explicitly.

Still a Clock Shop

The most unusual thing about Nakazawa Tokei Honten is easy to miss. It is open, and it is still selling clocks.

The ground floor has been reworked more than once over the past century, as any shop trading continuously for that long would be. The upper floor, in domestic use, has had comparatively little done to it. Nagano City records the registered portion as roughly 153 square metres on the ground floor and 138 square metres above, within a total building area of 158 square metres; the roof is hipped, with the eaves running parallel to the street, and covered in copper sheet.

Storey heights are the giveaway that this was an expensive building. Both floors are unusually tall for timber construction of the period, which is part of why the elevation carries its stone-like finish convincingly rather than looking like a cottage in a costume.

Visiting is straightforward and requires no arrangement. The building is roughly fifteen minutes on foot from the Zenkoji exit of Nagano Station, walking north along Chuo-dori; Zenkoji itself is another ten minutes beyond. The exterior can be photographed freely from the public street. The interior is a working shop, so anyone wanting to see it should go in during business hours as a customer and ask before photographing anything. Hours and closing days are set by the business, not by any heritage authority, and are worth checking in advance. The registered-property plaque is mounted on the building; several visitors have remarked that it is easy to walk past the place entirely without noticing what it is.