Okayama University School of Medicine Main Gate (Former Okayama Medical College Main Gate)

A Gate Built the Year a Medical School Became a University

The Main Gate of Okayama University School of Medicine (岡山大学医学部正門, Okayama Daigaku Igakubu Seimon), built in 1922 as the main gate of the former Okayama Medical College, stands at the Shikata Campus in Kita Ward, Okayama City, and was listed as a Registered Tangible Cultural Property of Japan on 15 May 2007.

Four brick piers carry the composition. The two inner piers rise 3.6 metres to the top of the lamps they support, with a clear driving opening of 6.2 metres between them. Two lower wing piers, 2.6 metres tall, close the arrangement at either side. Across the whole gate the span measures roughly ten metres.

Each pier begins with granite. Above the stone base the shafts are built up in red brick laid in header bond, so that only the short ends of the bricks face outward. The result is a surface of small tight rectangles rather than the long horizontal bands most people picture when they think of a brick wall. Granite reappears higher up, and copper bases at the summit carry the lamp fittings.

Then there are the capitals, which is where the gate stops being ordinary. The Agency for Cultural Affairs describes their treatment as Secession-influenced, referring to the Vienna Secession idiom of stepped geometric mouldings and flattened ornament that had worked its way into Japanese design during the Taisho era. On a provincial campus gate, that is an unusually deliberate flourish.

The date carries weight. In 1922 Okayama Medical Specialist School was raised to Okayama Medical College, a full university under the pre-war system, following the University Ordinance of 1918 that allowed a number of specialist schools to make the same jump. A gate of this expense reads differently once you know that.

Why a Gate Counts as Cultural Property

Japan's Registered Tangible Cultural Property system dates from 1996 and was built for exactly this kind of structure. Where the older Important Cultural Property designation freezes a building and requires official permission for alterations, registration asks only that the owner give notice. The lighter touch was intended to keep modern-era buildings, which exist in enormous numbers, in everyday working use rather than pushing owners toward demolition. The gate still functions as the entrance to a working hospital campus, which is the system operating as designed.

Registration files record which of three criteria applied in each case. The gate was entered under 造形の規範となっているもの, a model of design. The wooden gatehouse standing immediately beside it, registered on the very same day, was entered under a different criterion: contribution to the historic landscape of the country. The distinction looks like paperwork until you stand between the two and see how much more effort went into the brickwork.

The gate carries registration number 33-0152 and came through in the 54th round of registrations. Administratively it is classified not as a building but as a structure, and counted as a single unit.

Okayama has more of this material than most cities. The prefecture's list of registered structures runs to well over a hundred entries, and the university alone holds three of them, all registered on 15 May 2007.

Seeing the Gate

Visitors can view the gate from the public street at any hour, and the exterior is all that is available in any case, since a gate has no interior. Okayama Prefecture's own record lists public access for this property as exterior viewing only.

One point deserves emphasis before you plan a visit. The Shikata Campus is the medical, dental and hospital campus, and the university states plainly that free walking around is not possible there because of the hospital area. This is the opposite of the situation at the university's Tsushima Campus across town, which has no boundary wall and welcomes casual strollers. Look at the gate from outside, take your photographs from the road, and keep in mind that patients and their families are passing through it.

Getting there is straightforward. An Okaden bus stops at Daigaku Byoin Mae, right at the campus. The Okayama Electric Tramway reaches Seikibashi, about eight minutes on foot from the gate. By car, the trip from JR Okayama Station takes roughly ten minutes.

Give yourself a moment for the brickwork. Header bond is laborious, since it consumes far more bricks per square metre than the usual arrangements, and nobody chooses it to save money. Late afternoon light rakes across the pier faces and brings out the grid.

Then look sideways. The small wooden gatehouse beside the piers went up in the same year, and its roof is covered in natural slate cut into scallops. Brick and stone on one side, timber and slate on the other, built together as one piece of work.