Shizutani School Museum

A Meiji Schoolhouse at the End of the Stone Wall

The Shizutani School Museum (閑谷学校資料館, Shizutani Gakkō Shiryōkan) stands at Shizutani in the city of Bizen, Okayama Prefecture, was built in 1905 as the main building of the private Shizutani middle school, and was entered on the national register of Tangible Cultural Properties on 28 August 2001.

Most people arrive here having already walked the length of the great stone wall. That wall runs 765 metres around the older school grounds, its top rounded like a long grey animal, and beyond it stands the seventeenth-century lecture hall roofed in Bizen tile, the only school building in Japan designated a National Treasure. Then the path turns, and a Western-influenced timber schoolhouse appears where you were expecting more of the same.

The contrast is not accidental. The 1905 building went up on the site of the gakubo, the dormitory quarter where Edo-period students had lived. Two and a half centuries of Confucian education ended and a modern middle school began, on the same ground, in a completely different architectural language.

The Building Itself

The plan is a shallow U. Two wings project forward to the south from a long central range, with a corridor along the north side and staircases at either end of it. The structure is timber, two storeys, under a hipped roof of sankawara pantiles, and the recorded floor area is 762 square metres, which makes this by some distance the largest building covered in this group of Okayama registrations.

The exterior is Stick Style, with the timber frame expressed on the wall surface as applied boarding. The Agency for Cultural Affairs names the designer directly: Egawa Saburohachi, engineer to Okayama Prefecture, the same man responsible for the former Sengyo Elementary School in Maniwa. Egawa's schools have a recognisable character. They are sober rather than showy, they use the vertical board pattern to break up long elevations, and they handle the transition between Japanese roof and Western wall without the clumsiness that mars many contemporary attempts.

Registration came under the criterion of serving as a model of design. In practice the building also documents something else, which is what a provincial prefecture thought a modern school should look like in the year the Russo-Japanese War ended.

Six Names in Sixty Years

The institution changed its identity repeatedly. Founded as a private middle school in 1905, it was renamed in 1919, taken over by the prefecture in 1921 to become Okayama Prefectural Shizutani Middle School, and converted to a high school in the education reforms of 1948. The following year it merged with Wake High School and continued as that school's Shizutani campus until closure in 1964. From 1965 the building served as a prefectural youth education centre. When that centre relocated in 1991, the interior was given over to displaying the history of the school itself.

The rooms now hold documents and objects covering the whole span, from Ikeda Mitsumasa's founding of the original Shizutani school in 1670 through the Meiji revival and on to the prewar middle school. Reading these before walking the rest of the site changes what you notice outside, which is the argument for coming here first rather than last.

The museum has no separate ticket. Entry is covered by the admission charge for the historic site as a whole: 400 yen for adults, 200 yen for visitors aged 65 and over, 100 yen for primary and middle school students, with reductions for groups of thirty or more and free entry for holders of a disability certificate. Opening hours run from 9am to 5pm, with last entry at 4:30pm, and the site closes only over the year end, from 29 December to 31 December. Parking is free.

On photography, the rule inside the museum is specific: the building may be photographed, the exhibited documents may not. Elsewhere on the site, visitors may step onto the corridor of the National Treasure lecture hall but not into the room itself, and food and drink are not permitted within the grounds.

Bizen is the nearest interchange on the Sanyo Expressway, about fifteen minutes away by car. By rail the site is awkward, and most visitors take a taxi from Yoshinaga Station. The two Chinese pistache trees in front of the lecture hall turn scarlet in November and draw considerable crowds; the schoolhouse at the far end of the grounds stays comparatively quiet even then.