Former Nara Prefectural Products Exhibition Center

A Meiji Showroom Built in the Shape of a Temple

Two small pyramid-roofed towers anchor the ends of a long, perfectly symmetrical wooden building on the wooded approach to Kasuga Taisha, at the eastern edge of Nara Park. This is the former Nara Prefectural Products Exhibition Hall, finished in 1902 and designed by Sekino Tadashi (1867–1935), then a young prefectural engineer who would go on to become one of Japan's most important architectural historians. It opened that year as a showroom where Nara's local industries displayed and sold their goods, part of the Meiji government's drive to build up regional manufacturing.

Anyone familiar with the Japanese 10-yen coin will recognize the silhouette. A central hall under a hip-and-gable roof, fronted by an entrance porch with a curved cusped gable, sends two wings east and west to matching corner pavilions. Sekino took the composition straight from the Phoenix Hall of Byodo-in at Uji, the building stamped on that coin. He had measured the Phoenix Hall over 25 days as a student and made it the subject of his first published paper, so the resemblance is no accident.

Why It Was Designated

The hall became an Important Cultural Property on January 7, 1983. What gives it weight is the way it sets traditions side by side that rarely share a building. The frame, the walls, and the roof trusses use Western construction methods, while the outside wears Japanese dress, chosen so the new building would sit comfortably beside Nara's ancient temples and the parkland around it.

The woodwork rewards a close look. Frog-leg struts (kaerumata), curved tie-beams, boat-shaped bracket arms, and short queen posts draw on styles ranging across the Asuka through Kamakura periods, details Sekino knew first-hand from repairing real temples nearby in the late 1890s. Then the windows change the subject entirely. Circular openings shaped like eight-petalled flowers, and half-round frames cut with petal forms, bring in a clearly Islamic note. Carrying Japanese, Western, and Middle Eastern design on one modest building makes it a telling record of how late-Meiji architects looked abroad while keeping their feet at home.

What to Look For

See it from the front, straight on. From there the left-right symmetry reads in a single glance, and the wings step down in height toward the corner towers, giving the long facade a measured rhythm instead of a flat run of wall. The pale plaster and dark timber stand out against the green of the park behind it.

Then slow down and walk the length of the front. The Islamic-style windows are easy to miss from a distance but hard to forget once noticed; the flower-shaped openings in particular sit oddly and pleasantly against the otherwise Japanese composition. Compare the coin in your pocket with the real thing in front of you, and the small differences between Sekino's hall and the Phoenix Hall it echoes become a quiet game of spot-the-difference.

The exterior survives close to how it looked when it opened. The interior was altered several times over the building's working life, and seismic strengthening carried out between 2009 and 2011 included a partial restoration of historic features inside.

Around the Building

The hall stands on the stone-paved approach that runs east from Kofuku-ji toward Kasuga Taisha, so it falls naturally along a day of sightseeing in Nara Park. Nara National Museum, which now manages the building, is its immediate neighbor, with a renowned collection of Buddhist sculpture in the Nara Buddhist Sculpture Hall. Todai-ji and its Great Buddha lie a short walk north, Kasuga Taisha continues up the wooded approach to the east, and Kofuku-ji's five-story pagoda rises to the west. The famous wild deer roam the whole area.

Since 1989 the building has housed the museum's Research Center for Buddhist Art Materials, a library of books, journals, and photographs on Buddhist art. Its reading room opens to people with a research purpose on Wednesdays and Fridays; admission is free, and from May 2026 a reservation-priority system applies, though same-day use remains possible. For most travelers, though, the building is something to appreciate from the outside as part of a walk through the park.