Shinshu University Faculty of Education Book Storehouse (Former Nagano Prefectural Office Book Storehouse)

The Red-Brick Book Store That Outlived the Prefectural Office

The Shinshu University Faculty of Education Book Storehouse (信州大学教育学部書庫, Shinshū Daigaku Kyōiku Gakubu Shoko), formerly the Nagano Prefectural Office Book Storehouse, is a two-storey brick store built in 1895 on Shinshu University's Nagano (Education) campus in Nagano City, Nagano Prefecture, and was registered as a Registered Tangible Cultural Property on 8 July 2008.

It was put up to hold the books of the Nagano Prefectural Office and later passed to the Nagano Normal School and then to Shinshu University's Faculty of Education. The faculty's alumni association calls it the oldest building in the whole of Shinshu University. Since its restoration in 2017 it has served as the Faculty of Education Alumni Association Red Brick Hall (赤煉瓦館, Akarenga-kan), and that is the name most people on campus use.

The Agency for Cultural Affairs lists the address as 1139-1 Shimonagano, Nagano City; the faculty's own postal address is Nishinagano, a short distance west of Zenkoji Temple.

From Government Archive to Teachers' Library

Shinshu University's history records that the Nagano Ordinary Normal School, a forerunner of the education faculty, built new premises in 1887 immediately west of the old prefectural office, on the ground the campus still occupies. The prefecture's book store followed eight years later, in 1895.

According to the alumni association's timeline, when fire swept the prefectural office in 1908, this storehouse was the only building to survive. In 1911 the Nagano Normal School took it over as its own library store and filled it with around 18,000 volumes: teachers' materials and textbooks from the early Meiji years along with books in Western languages. The university archives add that it also held collections from domain-school libraries and rare books from the normal-school era.

When Shinshu University's Faculty of Education was created in 1949, the building became the faculty's book store. In 2014, six years after its registration, it was damaged in the Nagano Prefecture Kamishiro Fault Earthquake and could no longer be used for books. The alumni association decided to pay for its repair, and in 2017 it reopened as the Red Brick Hall.

Why It Was Registered

The Shinshu University Faculty of Education Book Storehouse was registered on 8 July 2008, in the 60th round of registrations, as Nagano Prefecture's building number 20-0335, under the criterion for buildings that contribute to the historic landscape.

A brick store built to keep the prefecture's books came through the fire that destroyed the office around it, went on to guard the library of the teachers' college and still stands on the same site. That history, tied both to the running of the prefecture and to the training of Nagano's teachers, is the heart of its value.

The Agency's description sums up the exterior in a few lines: a cut-stone base, walls in English bond, pilasters at the four corners, a string course in dark fired brick and stone around the openings. For a small store, it carries a good deal of the care seen in public brick buildings of the mid-Meiji period.

What to Look For

English bond and corner pilasters

The Nagano book storehouse is a two-storey brick block running east to west, 11 metres by 5.2 metres, with a building area of 59 square metres and a hipped roof of Sangawara-buki pantiles. The walls are laid in English bond, with pilasters at each corner. Look closely and you can see courses of long faces and courses of short ends alternating row by row.

A band of clinker brick

Midway up the walls runs a string course of yakisugi renga (焼過煉瓦), bricks fired hard at high heat to a deep brown, so that a single dark line seems drawn around the red walls. The alumni association singles out this band and the corner pilasters as the building's main decorative touches.

Stone lintels and door pivots

The base is dressed stone. The Agency describes the stone used for the lintels over the openings and for the blocks that carry the door hinges as accents on the facade. The front is symmetrical, with the entrance in the middle and a window on either side, and around each opening the red of the brick gives way to pale stone.

King-post roof and the rooms inside

The roof is carried on a king-post truss. The alumni association notes that the roof timbers are pine, the ground floor chestnut and the upper floor cedar. The restoration strengthened the foundations with reinforced concrete, added steel framing along the walls and used carbon-fibre sheets for earthquake protection. Today there is a meeting room for about 8 people downstairs and a hall for about 30 upstairs, used for seminars, lectures and concerts.

Visiting

The Shinshu University Faculty of Education Book Storehouse is run as a facility for students, staff and alumni, and as of October 2026 there was no notice of public access to the interior. According to the Agency, it stands at the northern edge of the faculty grounds. Visitors who want to see the exterior should enter by the main gate and take care not to disturb classes or events.

From the Zenkoji exit of JR Nagano Station, take an Alpico bus bound for Togakushi Chusha or Kinasa from stop 7 and get off after about 10 minutes at Shindai Kyoiku Gakubu-mae; the campus is directly across the road. Alternatively, ride one of the Zenkoji-bound buses from stop 1 for about 10 minutes to Hana no Koji, turn left at the Daimon junction and walk about 300 metres, roughly 7 minutes. The university asks visitors to use the main gate.