Okayama University Information Exhibition Room (Former Guardhouse of the Imperial Japanese Army 17th Division Headquarters)

An Army Guardhouse That Became a University Exhibition Room

The Okayama University Information Exhibition Room (岡山大学情報展示室), originally the guardhouse of the Imperial Japanese Army's 17th Division headquarters, stands beside the main gate of the Tsushima Campus at 1-1-1 Tsushima-naka, Kita Ward, Okayama City; built in 1911, it was listed as a Registered Tangible Cultural Property on 15 May 2007.

A guardhouse, or eiheijo, was where sentries stood their watch at the entrance to a military compound. Every division headquarters had one. This example is a single-storey timber building of 40 square metres, 7.3 metres along its length and 5.5 metres deep, roofed in tile and hipped on all four sides.

The wall treatment is worth naming. The cladding is German siding, a rebated weatherboard whose upper edge is grooved so that each board locks into the one above and sheds water without the stepped shadow of ordinary lapped boarding. Japanese builders adopted the profile from Western practice during the Meiji era and used it heavily on government and military work. Below the siding runs a band of vertical boarding, and the whole sits on a brick foundation. Double-hung sash windows line the long elevations.

The 17th Division was raised in November 1907, part of the army expansion that followed the Russo-Japanese War, with its headquarters at Okayama. The Tsushima site was its ground. The guardhouse went up four years later, in 1911.

It did not serve for long. In May 1925 the division was dissolved outright in the round of army cuts pushed through by War Minister Ugaki Kazushige, which eliminated four divisions at a stroke. Fourteen years of sentry duty, then the compound passed to other uses, and eventually to Okayama University, established in 1949.

What Registration Recognised

Okayama Prefecture's record describes the building as small in scale but carefully made, and credits it with holding together the appearance of the main gate approach. That is close to the registration criterion applied to it: contribution to the historic landscape of the country. The registration number is 33-0150, the first of three Okayama University properties entered on the same day in 2007.

There is a second value here that the architectural description does not fully capture. Physical traces of the pre-war army are thin on the ground in Japanese cities. Barracks burned, headquarters were cleared, parade grounds became stadiums and housing. When a divisional structure survives intact enough to register, it becomes evidence of a kind that written records cannot substitute for, and Okayama Prefecture's cultural properties material treats it explicitly as a war-related site.

Registration under the 1996 scheme was designed for exactly this situation. Rather than freezing the building, it obliges the owner to give notice before making changes, allowing continued practical use. The university has taken that latitude and run with it: the guardhouse now holds an exhibition on the history of the campus, which means the building explains its own site to anyone who walks in.

Displays inside cover how the university occupied and gradually replaced the army structures through the post-war decades, so the room documents the disappearance of the very landscape it belongs to.

Visiting

This is the one Okayama University cultural property you can walk into. Okayama Prefecture lists admission as free, with opening hours of 9:00 to 16:30, and closure on Saturdays, Sundays, public holidays, the New Year period and the university's summer shutdown. Enquiries go to the university's public relations section on 086-251-7292. Opening arrangements at university facilities change, so a call ahead is sensible if you are travelling any distance.

The campus around it is unusually welcoming. Okayama University states that the Tsushima Campus has no boundary wall separating it from the surrounding streets and that anyone may enter freely and walk the grounds. Weekends and holidays included, although offices are shut then. Two restrictions apply: buildings in use for research, experiments or teaching are off limits, and the campus closes to outsiders entirely on entrance examination days, including the national common test and the main February examination period. Driving in is discouraged.

Getting there takes minutes from the city centre. An Okaden bus to the Okadai Nishimon stop leaves you about one minute's walk away, and a car from the west exit of JR Okayama Station needs around seven minutes.

Look at the brick foundation course before you go inside. It is army work, laid in 1911, and it sets the building slightly above the ground in a way that reads differently from the concrete plinths on everything around it. The tiled hip roof and the run of sash windows along the flank are the other things to catch.

Since you are already on an open campus, walk further in. Other structures from the divisional period survive among the university buildings, and the row of ginkgo trees along the main approach is one of the sights of Okayama in late November.