Wakatake no Sono Nursery Office Wing

A Nursery Building From 1925 Behind the Ohara Museum

The Office Wing of Wakatake no Sono Nursery (若竹の園保育園舎事務室棟, Wakatake-no-Sono Hoikuensha Jimushitsu-tō, also romanised Wakatakenosono) is a single-storey wooden building of 1925 in Chūō 1-chōme, Kurashiki City, Okayama Prefecture, added to Japan's national register of Tangible Cultural Properties on 28 April 2009.

Kurashiki in the 1920s was a cotton town. Kurashiki Bōseki, the spinning company that later gave the city its museum and its hospital, drew large numbers of young women into mill work, and their children had nowhere to go during the working day. A women's group called the Kurashiki Satsuki-kai took up the problem. Its leading figure was Ohara Suehiko, wife of the industrialist Ohara Magosaburō, and the project went ahead with backing from Magosaburō himself and from Kurashiki Bōseki. The nursery opened on 15 March 1925 with places for eighty children.

The design came from Nishimura Isaku (1884-1963), a man who described himself variously as architect, painter, potter and educator, and who in 1921 had founded Bunka Gakuin in Tokyo with the poets Yosano Tekkan and Yosano Akiko: a school run deliberately outside the Ministry of Education's curriculum rules. He was already known in Kurashiki, having designed the town's Protestant church two years earlier. For the nursery he refused the single institutional block. His drawings scatter small wings across the site in a bungalow idiom, among trees, with a stream running through the garden. Children came to call the result their castle.

The office wing is the piece that meets you first.

What the Registration Recognises

Japan's registration system (登録有形文化財, tōroku yūkei bunkazai) sits below the better-known Important Cultural Property designation. It is a lighter instrument, created in 1996 for buildings roughly fifty years old or more that deserve to be kept in use rather than frozen. Owners accept a duty to notify the state before major alteration and gain access to repair advice and tax relief; the building carries on working. For a nursery still enrolling two hundred and twenty children, that distinction matters.

The office wing was entered under registration number 33-0228 in the sixty-third round of listings, with the notice published on 14 May 2009. The criterion applied was contribution to the historical landscape of the country. Its recorded figures are modest: one structure, timber, single storey, slate roof, building area 131 square metres.

Modest is the point. The nursery has been altered repeatedly since 1925. A reinforced-concrete two-storey block went up in 1971 when the timber buildings were judged too worn for the growing roll, a playroom followed in 1989, and infant and health rooms in 2001. Seismic reinforcement work on the wooden buildings ran across 2008 to 2010. What survived all of that, and what the register protects, is the original core: this wing and the south infant care wing standing a little further into the garden.

Reading the Building From the Gate

Approach from the lane on the east and the first thing to register is the porch, set at an angle. Nishimura swung it southeast so that it points at the garden gate instead of sitting square to the wing behind it, and the entrance itself is framed by an arch of piled stone. It is a small gesture, unmistakably domestic rather than official, and it sets the tone for everything past it.

Behind the porch the plan opens into a single large nursery room under a hipped roof. A gabled office block pushes north out of that room, so the silhouette reads as three shapes meeting at different angles rather than one long ridge. Look along the roofline and you will see the slate slope ease off near the eaves, flattening into a shallow skirt. That kink lowers the apparent height of the building and pulls the eaves closer to a child's eye level, which is very likely what Nishimura was after.

One practical matter. Wakatake no Sono is an operating licensed nursery, not a visitor attraction, and there is no public admission to the buildings or the garden. The wings can be seen from the surrounding lanes, and that is the appropriate limit. Photographing children or looking into the grounds during the day is not acceptable. Anyone wanting to understand the architecture in more depth should contact the Kurashiki City Board of Education's Cultural Properties Division rather than the nursery office.

Getting there is easy enough: about fifteen minutes on foot southeast of JR Kurashiki Station, inside the Bikan historical quarter, a short walk from the Ohara Museum of Art and the city's central library.