Hisa Kinzoku Kogyo Former President's Office

Hisa Kinzoku Kogyo Former President's Office: A Small Front in Scratch Tile

The Hisa Kinzoku Kogyo Former President's Office (久金属工業旧社長室, Hisa Kinzoku Kōgyō Kyū Shachōshitsu) is a one-story timber building at a bottle-cap maker's head-office factory in Kitatsumori, Nishinari Ward, Osaka City, built around 1937, repaired in 2019 and registered as a Registered Tangible Cultural Property on February 4, 2021.

It stands just south of the technical office and covers 50 square meters. The president's office occupies the front, and the former staff canteen runs back behind it.

So despite the name, the building put the head of the company and the workers' lunchroom under a single roof.

Why the Former President's Office Was Registered

The Agency for Cultural Affairs describes the Hisa Kinzoku Kogyo Former President's Office as small but carefully made, with its interior finishes and furniture well preserved, and calls the front dignified. It was registered for contributing to the historic landscape.

According to the company, a time clock mounted beneath a small Shinto shrine shelf still hangs inside. The company presents it as a clue to how employees moved through the working day.

What to Look For: Scratch Tile over Split Stone

The front wall is faced in Scratch tile, laid in horizontal courses according to the company. Below it, the base is clad in teppei-ishi, a thin-splitting slab stone, also laid horizontally. The combed tile above and the layered stone below give the two halves of the wall quite different textures.

A narrow canopy of Spanish-style clay tiles runs around at eave level, and double-hung sash windows are set symmetrically beneath it. Looked at straight on, the front has the bearing of a much larger Western-style building.

Sources disagree about the roof. The Agency's register gives sheet iron, while the company and Osaka Cultural Properties Navi give slate. This article follows the Agency.

Visiting the Former President's Office

The Hisa Kinzoku Kogyo Former President's Office stands inside the factory grounds and cannot normally be seen. Its interior, furniture and time clock are shown only on open-house tours, and in 2024 photography was restricted in parts of the interiors.

When the light falls across the front at a low angle, the grooves of the scratch tile throw fine shadows. The quality control office adjoining it on the south has the same 50-square-meter footprint but plain clapboard walls, and the pair shows at a glance how much care went into the face meant to be seen.