Kishiwada City Jisen Hall (Jisen Hall)

The Clubhouse a Cotton Town Built

Jisen Kaikan (岸和田市立自泉会館, also written Jisenkan and Kishiwada Municipal Jisen Kaikan) is a reinforced concrete building of 1932 in Kishijo-cho, Kishiwada City, Osaka Prefecture, and it was entered on Japan's register of Tangible Cultural Properties on 7 May 1997. It was designed by the architect Setsu Watanabe and built by Obayashi Corporation.

The money came from a retirement gift. Terada Jinyomo, founder of the Kishiwada Spinning Company, was presented with a testimonial payment in recognition of his years at the head of the firm. His eldest son Terada Jinkichi, who succeeded him as president, used it to build a clubhouse honouring his father and serving the company as a place to entertain directors, buyers and guests. Kishiwada in the early 1930s ran on cotton spinning, and the Terada family sat at the centre of that economy.

What followed was less settled. Kishiwada Spinning merged into Dai Nippon Spinning, ancestor of today's Unitika, in 1941. Jinkichi became mayor of Kishiwada in 1942 and, on leaving office the following year, gave the building to the city. It served as a meeting hall and reception room. After Typhoon Jane wrecked the city offices in 1950, the municipal assembly sat here. For a period it was lent to the Kishiwada Chamber of Commerce and Industry. Restoration in 1982, marking sixty years of municipal status, settled it into its present role as a cultural venue.

Reading a Small Watanabe Commission

The criterion applied here is that the building sets a standard in design. Its registration number is 27-0016 and it came in the second round of registrations, very soon after Japan created the registration system in 1996. Registration (toroku) differs from designation (shitei): it is a lighter framework based on notification rather than permission, introduced to protect the enormous stock of nineteenth and twentieth century buildings that fell outside the National Treasure and Important Cultural Property tiers.

The Agency for Cultural Affairs calls the building noteworthy as a relatively small, domestic-scale work within Watanabe's output. Setsu Watanabe (1884-1967) made his name on large commercial commissions, among them the Osaka Club of the cotton trade, the Menkyo Kaikan of 1931 in central Osaka, now an Important Cultural Property. The young Togo Murano worked in his office. The question this building answers is what a designer of bank and trading-house headquarters does when handed something small.

It is two storeys of reinforced concrete with a floor area of 539 square metres, in a manner Japanese sources call kinsei Spanish, a Spanish colonial revival idiom that was fashionable in Kansai between the wars. White wall planes carry a tiled roof, and the exterior is deliberately quiet. The exception is the entrance, where a colonnade brings the vocabulary of formal classical architecture into view at exactly the point a visitor first touches the building. Restraint everywhere, ceremony at one spot: the distribution reads like an office architect working at reduced scale.

Some fabric is gone. Under wartime metal requisition orders, the chandeliers, the stair balustrade and other decorative metalwork were surrendered. Apart from those losses, the interiors largely retain their 1932 character.

Visiting: Conditions and Surroundings

Jisen Kaikan is a working venue rather than a museum. Its hall, meeting rooms and exhibition room may be booked by anyone, resident or not, for cultural activities, and the hall hosts piano and organ concerts several times a year. An organ used in a Japanese television drama is on display.

Viewing comes with conditions worth checking before you travel. Kishiwada City gives opening hours as 9am to 5pm and admission as free. The building closes on Mondays, opening instead when the Monday is a public holiday and closing the following day, and it also closes over New Year, on the two days before Respect for the Aged Day, and on the second Tuesday of March. The point that catches people out: when an event is running, the interior cannot be viewed. Whether a booking is in place changes the answer on any given day, so call ahead on 072-423-9743 if you are coming any distance. Groups need to reserve in advance, and there is no car park.

The building stands on what was the northeastern part of the third enclosure of Kishiwada Castle, immediately by the city hall. Osaka Prefecture's tourism information gives the walk as about 10 minutes from Takojizo Station and about 15 minutes from Kishiwada Station, both on the Nankai Main Line. Kishiwada Castle is roughly 200 metres away and Kijo Shrine about the same, so the castle keep, its Hachijin no Niwa garden and this building fit comfortably into half a day, with the old merchant street of Honmachi along the Kishu Kaido within walking distance.

A bronze statue of Terada Jinyomo stands in the front garden. He is the man whose retirement gift paid for the building and whose career it was meant to commemorate. Look at him before passing through the colonnade, and the architecture and its motive line up as one story.