Okayama Prefectural Okayama Asahi High School (formerly the

A Timber Dojo Built for a Champion School

On the eastern edge of a hillside campus in central Okayama stands a long, low wooden hall that few visitors would guess holds a national designation. It was raised in 1919, the eighth year of the Taisho era, for the Sixth Higher School, one of the small group of elite national preparatory schools that fed graduates into the imperial universities of Tokyo and Kyoto. The school was abbreviated Rokkō, and its athletic clubs were famous across the country. The judo team in particular dominated the national inter-school tournaments of the period, taking the title eight years running at the end of the 1920s.

The building that housed that training is modest in outline and exacting in construction. It runs about 18 meters along the ridge and 13 meters across, a single timber story set on a brick footing and roofed with iron sheeting. The roof is gabled, and the entrance sits under the gable end rather than along the eaves, a plan Japanese carpenters call tsumairi. The total floor area comes to 241 square meters, almost all of it given over to an open mat space.

Why the Hall Carries a National Designation

The dojo was entered onto Japan's register of Tangible Cultural Properties in January 2011, in the sixty-ninth round of registrations, under reference number 33-0235. The category recognizes buildings that contribute to the historic character of their surroundings, and it covers structures of the modern era that retain their original design and craftsmanship. What earned the hall its place is its survival as a clear, well-preserved example of a Taisho-period sports building, a type that has largely vanished as schools rebuilt through the twentieth century.

Its significance is sharpened by what was lost around it. In June 1945 an air raid burned the main classroom blocks and dormitories of the Sixth Higher School. When the school was absorbed into the new Okayama University in 1949 and the grounds passed to the present high school, only a handful of structures from the original era remained. This dojo, the brick and concrete book stores, and the stone gate are the chief survivors, which is part of why each was registered together.

What to Notice When You See It

The detail worth knowing before you look is hidden under the mats. The floor framing was fitted with springs, so that the whole platform yields slightly underfoot. For a discipline built on throws and falls, that elasticity was a deliberate kindness to the body, and it is the feature that most clearly marks the building as purpose-made for judo rather than adapted from a general hall.

Above the foundation, the outer walls are clad in ribbed weatherboarding, the horizontal boards held by thin vertical battens in the manner known as sasarako shitami. Slanting knee braces, fitted when the hall was built, carry the wall loads at the corners. The roof overhead is framed not in the traditional Japanese manner but as a Western truss, a sign of how engineering ideas had entered Japanese school construction by the 1910s. Renovations in 1988 and 2007 kept the building in use without erasing these original choices.

One practical note. This is the campus of an active high school, so the dojo and the other registered structures are not open for casual visits. The stone gate and the long perimeter wall, however, can be appreciated from the public road that runs past the grounds.