Okayama Prefectural Takamatsu Agricultural High School

A Brick Building Under a Thatched Roof

The Museum of Okayama Prefectural Takamatsu Agricultural High School, formerly the Compost Shed of the Okayama Prefectural Agricultural School (岡山県立高松農業高等学校資料館, Okayama Kenritsu Takamatsu Nōgyō Kōtō Gakkō Shiryōkan), is a single-storey brick structure at 336-2 Harakosai, Takamatsu, Kita Ward, Okayama City, Okayama Prefecture, built in 1909 and entered on Japan's register of Tangible Cultural Properties on 2 October 2007.

The combination named in the registration description is the point of the building: brick walls carrying a thatched roof. Brick belonged to the industrial and institutional architecture of Meiji Japan, thatch to the farmhouse. The two rarely met, and the register calls the result a distinctive building for exactly that reason.

It was built as a compost shed. Farm schools of the period taught soil management as a technical discipline, and a purpose-built structure for producing and storing compost belonged to the teaching estate alongside classrooms and stock sheds.

What the Walls Show

The registration criterion is difficulty of reproduction, and a look at the construction explains why.

The building runs eleven metres along its length by 9.1 metres in depth, oriented north to south, with a building area of 99 square metres. Above the brick walls sits a trussed roof frame carrying a hipped-and-gabled thatch covering. The truss is worth noting on its own account: an imported structural system, arriving in Japan through Meiji engineering education, here supporting a roof covering of grass.

The brickwork is laid in Flemish bond, alternating headers and stretchers within each course. English bond, with alternating courses of headers and stretchers, was far more common in Japanese brick construction of this era, so the choice here is a deliberate one. Two buttresses stand against each face of the building, and the upper portion of the wall is finished in plaster.

High windows in the manner of mushiko-mado, the slatted openings of traditional townhouses, break the upper wall. These are a later alteration rather than original work.

Consider what a modern builder would face in reproducing this. Flemish bond in load-bearing brick, buttressed walls, a timber truss and a thatched hipped-and-gabled roof, all in one small agricultural outbuilding. Each of those trades has thinned, and the combination has no contemporary demand.

The School Around It

The institution began in 1897 as the Okayama Prefectural Agricultural Training Institute, established in what is now Tsushima in Kita Ward. In 1899 it was reorganised as the Okayama Prefectural Agricultural School, the first full-grade agricultural school in the prefecture, with three-year courses in agriculture and veterinary science. In 1902 it moved to Takamatsu village, the present site, and the compost shed followed seven years after the move.

The school became Okayama Prefectural Takamatsu Agricultural High School in 1948 and remains the only agricultural specialist high school in the prefecture, teaching agriculture, horticulture, livestock, agricultural engineering and food science. Its graduates number over twenty thousand.

The shed no longer makes compost. It stands in the southern half of the campus and now holds the school's archive collection, which is how it acquired its current name.

Visiting the Area

The building sits inside the grounds of an operating high school, and there is no general public opening. Visitors wishing to see it should contact the school in advance, and access will depend on the academic calendar. No admission fee applies, since the building is not run as a visitor attraction.

Photographing the building from outside the grounds is unproblematic. Students should not be photographed.

Bitchū-Takamatsu Station on the JR Momotarō Line, also known as the Kibi Line, is about five minutes away on foot, which makes this one of the more easily reached buildings on the register.

The station name carries weight locally. Bitchū-Takamatsu Castle, a short walk from the same station, is where Toyotomi Hideyoshi dammed the surrounding rivers in 1582 and flooded the defenders into surrender, a siege interrupted by news of Oda Nobunaga's death at Honnōji. The site is nationally designated and the low ground still reads as the basin it became.

Saijō Inari, one of Japan's principal Inari shrines, lies a few minutes north by car. Two stops further along the line, Kibitsu Shrine holds a main hall and worship hall designated National Treasures, with a roofed corridor running some 360 metres along the hillside.