Okayama Prefectural Sports Ground Club (former Okayama Kaikosha)

An Officers' Club in a Sports Park

The Okayama Prefectural Ground Club, formerly the Okayama Kaikōsha (岡山県総合グラウンドクラブ（旧岡山偕行社）, Okayama-ken Sōgō Ground Club, kyū Okayama Kaikōsha), is a Western-style timber building at 1-1 Izumi-chō, Kita Ward, Okayama City, Okayama Prefecture, built in 1910 and entered on Japan's register of Tangible Cultural Properties on 13 August 2012.

The land around it explains the building. What is now a sports park covering thirty-five hectares was a military parade ground from the Meiji period until the end of the Pacific War. The Kaikōsha was the officers' club of the Imperial Japanese Army's 17th Division, a social and meeting hall for commissioned officers, part of a national network of such clubs built beside garrisons across Japan.

The division is gone, the parade ground became Okayama Prefectural Multipurpose Grounds for the 1962 National Sports Festival, and the club now holds meeting rooms hired out by the day.

Classical Dress on a Timber Frame

The registration criterion is contribution to the historic landscape of the nation. The description in the national database is unusually specific about how the building looks, and the details reward checking against the actual facade.

The structure is timber, two storeys, with a hipped roof of pantiles. It measures 23.7 metres along the front by 10.9 metres in depth, with staircase blocks under gabled roofs projecting at either end of the front elevation. Building area is 324 square metres and the registration number is 33-0252.

The exterior handles this frame in classical terms. Semicircular pediments sit over the openings and Ionic columns carry the entrance, the order identifiable by the paired volutes scrolling outward at the capital. Both are conventions of European stone architecture, executed here entirely in wood.

Late Meiji Japan produced a good deal of this kind of work, sometimes called pseudo-Western architecture, in which carpenters trained in traditional joinery reproduced classical vocabulary from pattern books and photographs. Military architecture was among the most consistent patrons of the mode, because a garrison building was expected to look like the modern state that had built it.

The symmetry is worth noticing. The two projecting staircase blocks give the front a strong tripartite rhythm, which is a temple-front composition applied to a social club on a drill field.

A Building That Has Moved

Little about this building has stayed still. The national database records repairs in 1950 and relocation with repairs in 1968 and again in 2003, the last of these to make way for a new gymnasium.

Other accounts describe a preservation and reuse project around 1989 and 1990, after which the building reopened under a new name, and a shift of roughly a hundred metres westward. The relationship between these accounts and the dates in the national register is not fully clear, and the register should be treated as authoritative on the sequence.

What matters for a visitor is the consequence. A timber building can be dismantled and rebuilt in a way a masonry one cannot, and this one has been through the process more than once. Its survival on a site that has been rebuilt repeatedly for sporting events is a direct result of that portability.

The building appeared as a filming location for the NHK morning drama serial Come Come Everybody, which brought a wave of visitors unfamiliar with its military origins.

Getting There and Getting In

The Ground Club functions as a rentable facility rather than a museum. Two training rooms are available for hire: the first seats about forty in a space of roughly 11.9 by 9.1 metres, the second about twenty in 6.9 by 9.1 metres. Booking opens on the first weekday two months ahead, at the office inside the arena.

Opening hours run from 8:30 to 17:00, and the facility closes on Mondays, or the following day where a Monday falls on a public holiday. Anyone can walk up to the building and look at it during park hours without booking anything, and there is no charge for doing so.

Photography of the exterior is unrestricted. Rooms in use by a hiring group are private, so ask before entering.

From JR Okayama Station, leave by the west exit and walk roughly seventeen to twenty minutes. The park has parking for around 250 cars, though it fills on event days.

Two things nearby deserve time. Behind the club lies a pond ringed with bald cypress, whose knobby aerial roots break the surface of the ground in a way that surprises people who have not seen them before. Elsewhere in the park, the Tsushima archaeological site preserves evidence of early Yayoi period paddy fields, with reconstructions of the buildings and fields of the era.