Wakatake no Sono Nursery South Infant Care Wing

Two Rooms and a Brick Terrace

The South Infant Care Wing of Wakatake no Sono Nursery (若竹の園保育園舎幼児保育南棟, Wakatake-no-Sono Hoikuensha Yōji Hoiku Minami-tō, also romanised Wakatakenosono) is a single-storey wooden building of 1925 in Chūō 1-chōme, Kurashiki City, Okayama Prefecture, entered on Japan's national register of Tangible Cultural Properties on 28 April 2009.

It is the smaller of the two registered wings at the nursery: 56 square metres of building area against the 131 of the office wing that stands just to its north. Inside are two nursery rooms, arranged one behind the other along a north-south axis. On the east side of the southern room, a terrace paved in brick opens directly onto the play yard.

That terrace is the whole argument of the building. There is no lobby, no corridor, no threshold ceremony. A child in the south room steps out of it and is already outdoors.

Nishimura Isaku and the Idea of a Room You Live In

The architect was Nishimura Isaku (1884-1963), who is remembered less for any single building than for an attitude. In 1919 he published a book on the pleasant home, arguing for houses organised around a family living room instead of a sequence of formal tatami spaces used for receiving guests. Two years later he founded Bunka Gakuin in Tokyo, a school that operated outside the Ministry of Education's curriculum rules and taught with the poet Yosano Akiko among its staff. He designed its buildings himself, in an English cottage manner.

Kurashiki came to him through a lecture. Invited by the town's cultural association to speak on putting cultured living into practice, he formed connections that led to commissions for the local Protestant church in 1923 and, in 1925, for this nursery.

The founding body was the Kurashiki Satsuki-kai, a women's association led by Ohara Suehiko, whose husband Ohara Magosaburō ran Kurashiki Bōseki and later built the art museum that still stands nearby. Mill work had pulled young mothers into the factories; the nursery was the group's answer. It opened on 15 March 1925 for eighty children.

Reading the south wing with the 1919 book in mind is useful. A room that spills straight onto a brick terrace and then onto grass is the nursery equivalent of a living room that faces the garden rather than the street.

The Bend in the Plan, and Why the Building Survived

Walk the perimeter and the geometry becomes clear. The wing runs north-south, then at its northern end turns a right angle to the east, so the gable end presents itself frontally rather than showing a long flank. The slate roof carries the same trick used across the complex: the pitch relaxes near the eaves into a shallow, almost horizontal skirt, which drops the visual weight of the roof and brings its edge down toward the height of the people it shelters.

Ornament is close to absent. No carved brackets, no applied mouldings. The Agency for Cultural Affairs record calls the wing plain and graceful, and those two words together are a fair summary of what Nishimura was reaching for.

Survival was not guaranteed. Wakatake no Sono has been rebuilt around its original core more than once: a reinforced-concrete block in 1971 when capacity rose to two hundred and twenty, a playroom in 1989, infant and health rooms in 2001. Seismic strengthening of the wooden buildings was carried out over 2008 to 2010, immediately before registration. The south wing and the office wing are what remains of 1925, and both are still in daily use by children.

Which sets the terms for anyone who wants to see them. There is no public admission to the buildings or the play yard, and no visiting hours, because this is a licensed nursery rather than a museum. The exteriors are visible from the lanes around the site. Do not photograph children or shoot into the grounds. Enquiries about the architecture belong with the Cultural Properties Division of the Kurashiki City Board of Education. The site sits inside the Bikan historical quarter, roughly fifteen minutes on foot southeast of JR Kurashiki Station, near the Ohara Museum of Art.