Shōwa

Built in 1938 in Sakuho, Nagano, Sakae Bridge is Japan's longest-span prewar concrete Lohse arch, designed by Nakajima Takeshi, who pioneered the form.

A sukiya-style ryokan wing designed in 1932 by Arata Endo, who assisted Frank Lloyd Wright. It shaped the modern Japanese inn and now hosts guests as Honenmushi.

A 1942 tea house on school grounds in Iizuna, Nagano. Two rooms share one mizuya so a whole class could practise, and its sukiya detailing won registration in 2016.

Discover the Shinano Educational Society Lifelong Learning Center in Azumino, Nagano — a 1929 wooden Gothic Revival building, nationally registered cultural property, embodying Nagano's renowned tradition of educational devotion.

Built in 1938 in Iida City's former samurai district of Naka-no-machi, the Shimoina Educational Hall is a wooden two-story Western-style building marked by a central Mansard gable, paired dormer windows, and pale-blue weatherboard walls. One of the few pre-war buildings to survive the great Iida fire of 1947, it was designated a Nationally Registered Tangible Cultural Property in 2014 and still serves as the active headquarters of the Shimoina Educational Association, founded in 1879. It stands quietly along Shunso-dori, a street named after the celebrated Meiji-era painter Hishida Shunso.

Quietly facing Lake Suwa in Nagano, Suwako Hotel Geihinkan is a Registered Tangible Cultural Property completed in 1928 by the Katakura silk dynasty. This wooden two-story villa pairs a Spanish-style exterior with a hybrid interior — Western rooms downstairs, Japanese rooms upstairs — finished with Italian marble and Taiwanese cypress. Discover one of early-Showa Japan's finest private villas, alongside its neighbour Katakura-kan.

Located in Suwa City, Nagano Prefecture, the Seiko Epson Founding Memorial Hall (former Daiwa Kogyo Office) is a wooden two-story building completed in October 1945 as the office of Daiwa Kogyo Limited and registered as a National Tangible Cultural Property in February 2023. Built from timber salvaged from local agar warehouses during the postwar shortages, it is valued both as a vivid record of emergency postwar construction and as the birthplace of Japan's modern wristwatch industry. Now open to the public as the Founding Memorial Hall of the Epson Museum Suwa, the building lets visitors experience the spirit of "sincere effort" championed by founder Hisao Yamazaki and trace the journey from this modest office to world-changing innovations such as the first quartz wristwatch and the first compact digital printer.

Zozan Shrine Treasure Hall in Matsushiro, Nagano, is a small 1938 storehouse with a copper gabled roof, slatted windows and plaster walls, registered in 2005.

Zozan Shrine Main Hall in Matsushiro, Nagano, is a 1938 cypress sanctuary in three-bay nagare-zukuri form, registered in 2005 for its plain, archaic design.

A tiny iron-roofed shed of 8.4 square metres covering the founding-era round well at the Takeshige brewery in Motai, where soft Mt. Tateshina water begins its work.

A tall early-Showa storehouse at the north edge of the Takeshige brewery in Motai, built to season the timber for its sake barrels and marking the compound's growth.

An early-Showa rice-polishing house at the Takeshige brewery in Motai, set where waterways meet and once driven by a wheel on the roadside channel to mill the rice.

An early-Showa L-shaped earthen cellar on the corner across the old Nakasendo from a Nagano brewery's gate, its gable turned to the road to close the street scene.

An early-Showa single-storey earthen cellar south of the old Nakasendo in Motai, its east gable facing the lane to the highway, its clapboard base matching the next.

A small Hachiman shrine of 1930 at the back of a Nagano brewer's estate: a one-bay nagare-zukuri sanctuary in a copper-roofed shelter with a gabled hall before it.

Completed in 1933 and registered in 2003, this scratch-tiled block at Matsumoto Fukashi High School carries pointed arches said to echo Tokyo's Yasuda Auditorium.

This 1934 hall at Matsumoto Fukashi High School doubles as a gymnasium, resting a steel-trussed pantile roof on concrete walls behind five pointed entrance arches.

The Nichirinsha in Azumino is a circular two-storey timber hall 13 metres across, modelled on the Uchihara barracks, completed in May 1945 and registered in 2009.

The Nippon Sei Ko Kai Chubu Diocese Inariyama All Saints Church, a reinforced concrete chapel built in 1933 along the historic Zenkōji Highway in Chikuma City, Nagano, was registered as a national Tangible Cultural Property in 2023. Discover the history of Canadian Anglican missionary work and the distinctive architecture featuring buttress-like pilasters and semicircular arched windows.

Discover the Iiyama Resurrection Church, a 1932 wooden chapel designed by Canadian missionary Rev. Waller, blending Gothic architecture with Japanese tatami floors in Nagano's historic Buddhist temple town. A nationally Registered Tangible Cultural Property.