Yamamoto Rock Machine (Former Yamamoto Iron Works) Youth School

Yamamoto Rock Machine Youth School: Classrooms above the Storeroom

The Yamamoto Rock Machine (Former Yamamoto Iron Works) Youth School (ヤマモトロックマシン（旧山本鉄工所）青年学校) is a 2-story timber schoolhouse built around 1938 by a rock drill maker in Tojo-cho, Shobara City, Hiroshima Prefecture, to educate its young workers, and it was registered as a Registered Tangible Cultural Property on 25 February 2016. It has a tiled roof and a building area of 309 square meters, and its clipped-gable roof matches those of the company dormitories.

The two floors had entirely different jobs. The ground floor was a single storeroom; the upper floor was the school. Upstairs, a central corridor runs between two rows of three rooms, which included classrooms for four year-groups. Classrooms stacked on top of a warehouse: a no-nonsense building from a company that made things.

Why the Youth School Was Registered

It was registered for contributing to the historic landscape. The Agency for Cultural Affairs values it as a building that shows how the company educated its apprentice machinists, the trainees who went on to play central roles on the shop floor. These were young recruits who learned skills and theory alongside their work in the factory.

Youth schools were part-time schools for working young people, established under the Youth School Ordinance of 1935. Some companies ran their own, and as its name indicates, this building shows what such an in-house school looked like. It went up as the company was growing on the strength of domestically made rock drills and approaching its incorporation in 1939, when training skilled workers in-house had become central to production.

According to Shobara City, apprentice training continued in this building until around 1980, the middle of the Showa 50s. The youth school system itself was abolished shortly after the war, but the building remained the company's training center for decades. Classrooms that turned out skilled workers for more than 40 years, still standing beside the factories and dormitories they served, are what give the Yamamoto Rock Machine youth school its value.

What to Look For at the Youth School

From outside, compare the two floors. Looking for differences in the size and spacing of the windows between the ground-floor storeroom and the upper-floor classrooms is a good way to read a building whose two levels had different purposes.

The clipped-gable roof is the same form used for the three dormitory buildings south of the road. The factory sheds have sheet-metal roofs topped with ridge monitors, while the school and the dormitories share tiled clipped gables. Walk the whole site and the distinction between places for work and places for learning and living becomes visible in the roofs.

If you get inside, stand in the upstairs corridor and look along the classroom doors on either side. Classrooms for four year-groups show that apprentice training was a course lasting several years, not a short induction.

Visiting the Youth School

The Yamamoto Rock Machine youth school is on company land and is not open on a regular basis. Its address belongs to the same Kawanishi block as the former dormitories, and the exterior can be seen from the surrounding public roads.

The interior opens only during tours held by the company or the preservation group, and whether it is included varies from event to event. Do not enter the grounds without permission, and photograph from the road.