Niigata University Asahimachi Academic Materials Exhibition

Concrete, Gothic, and 1929

The Niigata University Asahimachi Academic Collections Museum (新潟大学旭町学術資料展示館, formerly the Niigata Normal School Memorial Hall, 旧新潟師範学校記念館), a reinforced concrete building in Chuo Ward, Niigata City, Niigata Prefecture, was completed in 1929 and entered the national register of Tangible Cultural Properties on 10 November 2005, with notification following on 5 December.

Of the historic university structures on the Asahimachi campus, this is the one you can walk into. Admission is free.

The building was paid for by the alumni association of the old Niigata Normal School and put up as a memorial hall. Normal schools trained teachers, and their graduates carried a strong institutional loyalty; funding a permanent building was a way of making that loyalty visible in the landscape. Over the following decades the hall served other purposes, including a period as a children's museum. Niigata University itself was established in 1949 by amalgamating the normal school, the medical college and several other institutions, and the hall passed into university hands with everything else.

It reopened in its present role in December 2001, was renamed in April 2004, and in October 2022 received ministerial recognition as a facility equivalent to a museum under the Museum Act.

Registered Under the Stricter Criterion

Japan's register of Tangible Cultural Properties accepts buildings under three criteria. Most registrations use the third, which covers structures contributing to the historic landscape of the country. It is the catch-all, and the great majority of the roughly 14,000 registered buildings in Japan fall under it.

This building was registered under the first criterion instead: that it serves as a model of design. That is the more demanding standard, reserved for buildings whose architectural quality itself is the reason for protection.

Two things earned it. The first is the structure. Reinforced concrete arrived slowly in provincial Japan, and a two-story concrete building of 1929 makes this one of the oldest surviving examples in Niigata City. The second is the styling. The exterior follows the Neo-Gothic manner that ran through Japanese institutional architecture in the early Showa years, applied with an unusual degree of discipline for a regional commission.

The design and construction were both handled by Shimizu-gumi of Tokyo, the firm known today as Shimizu Corporation. Attribution rests on surviving drawings rather than on tradition, which is worth stating: for most buildings of this period in the provinces, the architect is simply unknown.

Registration carries lighter obligations than designation as an Important Cultural Property. The university notifies the authorities before major exterior alterations and receives tax relief in return, while continuing to use the building as a working museum. That balance is the entire point of the register.

What to Look For, Inside and Out

Approach from the north, which is the front. The composition is symmetrical, and the central bay is pushed up higher than the flanks to lock the symmetry in place.

Pilaster strips run unbroken from ground to roofline across the front and both side elevations, and the windows are cut tall and narrow between them. Both devices pull the eye upward. This is what Neo-Gothic meant in Japanese hands: not pointed arches and tracery, but verticality achieved through proportion.

The wall surface repays close attention. At ground-floor plinth level the finish is cast stone. Above that, the entire building is faced in scratch tile, an extruded tile dragged with a comb before firing to leave fine vertical grooves. Scratch tile was fashionable in Japan through the 1920s and 1930s because it broke up flat surfaces and caught light differently through the day. Run a hand across it and the texture is immediately obvious.

The windows are not original fabric, and the story behind them is a good one. During renovation work in 2021 the university reconstructed the window design using the original drawings and period photographs, undoing later replacements. Comparing the current openings with the archive image displayed inside is a small exercise in reading restoration decisions.

Inside, the staircase is the piece to slow down for. The balustrade and its supporting posts survive with their original detailing.

Planning a Visit

Opening hours are 10:00 to 12:00 and 13:00 to 16:30, with the building closed over the lunch hour. Closed Sundays and Mondays, for three days in mid-August, and from 29 December to 3 January. Admission is free. Enquiries on 025-227-2260.

Photography inside is generally permitted, though restrictions can apply to particular loan exhibits, so check at the desk on arrival.

The permanent displays run under two headings, the development of nature and technology, and human history. Among the archaeological material are flame-style earthenware vessels from the Osawa site in Niigata City and the Ishikura site in Nagaoka, the extravagantly sculptural Jomon pottery of the Shinano River basin. Special exhibitions drawn from faculty research change several times a year.

Getting there: JR Hakusan Station on the Echigo Line is a twenty-minute walk (1.5 km). By Niigata Kotsu bus, alight at Higashi-Nakadori for a five-minute walk, or Niitsu Kinenkan-mae for three minutes on the city sightseeing loop. A taxi from Niigata Station takes about ten minutes. Parking is limited to five spaces, so public transport is the better option.

One reason this 1929 building still stands deserves a sentence. Niigata City was on the American shortlist of atomic bomb targets, and cities on that list were excluded from the incendiary raids that burned out most Japanese urban centres in 1945. The bomb never came, and neither did the firestorm. Prewar Niigata survived through a grim accident of planning, which is why the Nishi-Ohata and Asahimachi neighbourhoods retain the density of early modern buildings they do. The Niitsu Memorial Hall, a 1938 mansion registered in 1998, stands a few minutes away, and the medical faculty's registered brick wall and gate of 1911 and 1914 run along the next block.