Okayama University School of Medicine Gatehouse (Former Okayama Medical College Gatehouse)

Twenty-Two Square Metres on the National Register

The Gatehouse of Okayama University School of Medicine (岡山大学医学部門衛所, Okayama Daigaku Igakubu Mon'eijo), built in 1922 for the former Okayama Medical College, stands beside the main gate of the Shikata Campus in Kita Ward, Okayama City, and was listed as a Registered Tangible Cultural Property on 15 May 2007.

It is very small. The registered floor area comes to 22 square metres, a single storey measuring 6.4 metres along its length and 3.6 metres in depth. A modest one-bedroom apartment would swallow it. Yet the building carries its own entry on the national register, separate from the brick gate it serves.

The plan is the first surprise. Rather than the rectangle such a structure would normally take, the roof reads as an irregular hexagon, its hipped form cut back at the corners so the little building presents angled faces to the approaching street instead of a flat wall. Someone thought about how this would be seen from a moving vehicle.

The second surprise is the roofing. Natural slate covers it, cut into scallops and laid in overlapping courses so the surface takes on the pattern of fish scales. Slate of this kind was quarried in Japan and used sparingly, mostly on public buildings and banks; finding it on a gatekeeper's hut says something about the budget that was available in 1922.

The walls are timber, clad in horizontal weatherboarding with a band of vertical boarding along the lower portion. Double-hung sash windows sit around the entrance, where the gatekeeper needed to see out and be seen. Granite forms the base, matching the stone used in the piers of the gate a few steps away.

The Case for Keeping It

Gatehouses of this type were once standard equipment at Japanese institutions. Universities, hospitals, army barracks, factory compounds and large estates all posted someone at the entrance, and that person needed shelter, a stove, a window onto the road and a place to keep the register of visitors. The buildings were small, cheap to put up and easy to knock down when a new access-control system arrived. Most of them are gone.

Registration acknowledged what survives here. The criterion applied to this gatehouse was contribution to the historic landscape of the country, which is the broadest of the three grounds available under the system and the one most often cited. The brick gate beside it received a different and narrower criterion, being judged a model of design. The pairing is instructive: one structure was singled out for its artistry, the other for holding together the scene at the entrance.

The registration number is 33-0151, one below the gate at 33-0152, both processed in the 54th round. The Registered Tangible Cultural Property scheme itself began in 1996 as a lighter alternative to formal designation, requiring owners to notify rather than seek permission before making changes, on the reasoning that modern buildings survive best when they stay in use.

A note on the Japanese name for readers working from the characters. 医学部門衛所 divides as 医学部 (School of Medicine) plus 門衛所 (gatehouse), and the official reading confirms it: Igakubu Mon'eijo. The middle characters can look like a compound meaning something else entirely, which trips up more than a few search engines.

Standing at the Entrance

Okayama Prefecture records public access to this property as exterior viewing only, which is the practical reality in any case: the building is university property in a working entrance. The gatehouse faces the public street and can be looked at and photographed from outside at any hour.

Plan around the campus, though. Shikata is where Okayama University Hospital sits alongside the medical and dental schools, and the university states that free walking around this campus is not possible because of the hospital area. That instruction is worth respecting. View the gatehouse from the road, keep your visit brief, and stay clear of people arriving for appointments.

Access is easy enough. Okaden buses stop at Daigaku Byoin Mae, immediately by the campus. From the Okayama Electric Tramway stop at Seikibashi the walk takes about eight minutes. A car from JR Okayama Station needs roughly ten.

What repays attention is the roof. Stand where you can see the slate surface at a shallow angle and the scalloped courses resolve into a texture that photographs poorly and rewards the eye. On a wet day the slate darkens and the scale pattern sharpens.

Compare the two structures while you are there. Brick piers with granite bases and Secession capitals on one hand; weatherboarded timber and slate on the other. Both went up in 1922, both entered the register on the same day, and the contrast between a display piece and a working shelter is the whole point of the composition.

Anyone with an interest in this material should also make time for the university's Tsushima Campus across the city, where a former army guardhouse of 1911 is likewise registered, and where the campus has no boundary wall and welcomes visitors to walk in freely.