Taishō

The Ueda Sanshu Cooperative Office Building in Nagano is a registered Tangible Cultural Property completed in 1917. This elegant timber-framed office, with its symmetrical facade and pediment windows, stands as a proud symbol of Uedas golden age as Japans foremost silkworm-egg producing city.

In Matsumoto's Hofukuji post town the Ozawa family kept the honjin inn. Their gable-fronted main house, rebuilt in 1913, rises around a skylit three-storey atrium.

The Former Showa Kogyo Silk Reeling Mill, preserved at Matsumoto Rekishi no Sato in Nagano Prefecture, is a Taisho-era silk factory that operated from around 1925 until 1995. Registered as a National Tangible Cultural Property, it preserves the complete silk production workflow and original machinery, offering an authentic glimpse into Japan's silk heritage.

Built in 1926 by American missionary Jorgensen as a summer villa in Karuizawa, this two-story wooden residence features a gable roof, stone fireplace, and open clapboard exterior. Registered as a National Tangible Cultural Property in 2018, it stands as a testament to the missionaries who shaped Karuizawa into Japan's premier highland resort.

A 1921 head office of an Okaya silk filature in Nagano. Timber-framed but clad in brick tile, it saw the 1927 Yamaichi strike and now houses a weaving workshop.

A late Taisho shoin in Matsushiro, Nagano City: six rooms in two files, a tea room with a round window, and a floor raised to frame the pond garden beyond.

A 1923 plaster-walled merchant house on Komoro's old Hokkoku road, now a free exhibition hall keeping its shop counter and trolley rails. A readable piece of the old post town, minutes on foot from the castle ruins at Kaikoen park.

At the Sakai brewery in Chikuma, Nagano, the Taisho-gura looks like a storehouse but was the lodging where the master brewer and his winter workers actually lived.

The Shōrenji Shōtoku Taishi-dō in Matsushiro, Nagano City, is a Registered Tangible Cultural Property rebuilt in 1912 through community donations after a great fire. Its remarkable kotee plaster reliefs of dragons, auspicious beasts, and arabesque motifs showcase masterful traditional plastering techniques, while the hall embodies the deep Jōdo Shinshū devotion to Prince Shōtoku in a castle town steeped in Sanada clan heritage.

An L-shaped Taisho-era rice granary at the Takeshige brewery in Motai, extending the front bin and marking a stage in the brewery's growth. Listed as hard to recreate.

A Taisho-era two-storey earthen-wall building on the west edge of the Takeshige brewery in Motai, once the cooperage where sake barrels were made, now used for storage.

A dozo storehouse at the Takeshige brewery in Motai, added north of the No. 3 Storehouse and dated by an ink inscription on its ridge beam to March 1922.

A Taisho-era brick cistern in English bond at the Takeshige brewery in Motai, divided for household and brewing water and valued as a mark of the brewery's modernisation.

A Taisho-era four-and-a-half-mat tea room in the corner of a Nagano sake brewer's retirement quarters, plastered like a storehouse to resemble a small castle turret.

A Taisho-era two-storey retirement house on a stone-walled terrace at the corner of a Nagano brewer's estate, reached by a stepped corridor through the west cellar.

A Taisho-era retaining wall of tortoise-shell and herringbone masonry topped by a white plastered fence, enclosing three sides of a Nagano brewer's retirement plot.

A two-storey earthen fermentation cellar of 185 square metres behind the No. 2 cellar at a Nagano brewery, dated to 30 April 1917 by an ink inscription on its beam.

Nakazawa Tokei Honten on Nagano's Zenkoji approach is a timber building of 1924 whose washed-aggregate render imitates stone. It is still a working clock shop.

This 1916 timber building at Nagano Meijo in Chikuma shows refined modern Japanese-style craft, with grey plaster and a zelkova alcove above the ground-floor shop.

West of the inner wing at the ryokan Hanaya, the Hanaya Hotel Great Inner Building of 1918 is a detached room of 54 square metres with its own hot-spring bath.