Shōwa
昭和Browse Japan’s cultural heritage from the Shōwa period (1926 – 1989). Filter by prefecture, type, and keyword, with concise stories, maps, and travel tips.
A bracket gate 2.0 metres wide on a stone plinth, lattice doors outside and folding doors within, plus 15 metres of plastered fence. Registered in 2025.
Registered in March 2025, this 174-square-metre Nara townhouse of 1940 sits back behind its own gate and keeps its half-storey, doma and cooking hearth.
Only 19 square metres, this Nara storehouse of about 1940 pairs a heavy hongawara gable with namako-kabe tilework on its courtyard face. Registered 2025.
An early Showa storehouse for household goods in Uda, Nara: an earthen kura under a separate roof, white plaster over charred cedar, and a shared anteroom.
An early Showa annex behind a soy merchant's house in Uda, Nara, with a corridor of frost-glass doors on its south side, a tatami room upstairs and a bath below.
A 1928 Renaissance-style bank in Kashihara, Nara, registered in 2006, designed by Funahashi Shunichi with Ionic columns, now a wedding restaurant.
Kettle house of about 1926 at Kobaien, ink maker since 1577: a tall gabled room with an earth floor and a cut-stone well in its one open corner. Registered in 1998.
Building of about 1926 at Kobaien, ink maker since 1577: once rooms for live-in staff, now a changing room, extended twice around a 2-storey core. Registered 1998.
Early Showa workshop at Kobaien, ink maker since 1577: a tall single-storey room where kneaded glue and soot are weighed and pressed into moulds. Registered in 1998.
Early Showa room at Kobaien, ink maker since 1577: a tall 15-square-metre building where guests were received and later shown how ink is made. Registered 1998.
Early Showa glue house at Kobaien, ink maker since 1577: an earth-floored room with 2 brick hearths and a chimney, where glue was melted for ink. Registered 1998.
Early Showa work house at Kobaien, ink maker since 1577: where wood ash for drying ink was dried and the sticks were bound in rice straw. Registered in 1998.
Early Showa bathhouse for the craftsmen of Kobaien, ink maker since 1577: 4 washing tubs and 1 rinsing tub in their old layout under a vent roof. Registered 1998.
Early Showa U-shaped block at Kobaien, ink maker since 1577: once a mould store, now where ink is polished, with a work rail through one wing. Registered 1998.
Saho Kaikan, the alumni hall of Nara Women's University, a tall timber building of 1928 with a carriage porch and sash windows, stands on the campus in central Nara.
The notice board shelter of Jokyoji on Sanjo-dori in Nara, a small gabled copper-roofed structure of 1933 on a cut-stone base, is carefully detailed throughout.
A wooden reception room built around 1951 against a storehouse at Zeitaku Mame Honpo in Nara, with a copper skirt roof, a garden window and a coffered ceiling.
A small storehouse of about 1933 sits at the rear of a Naramachi plot, hard against the Gangoji boundary. Its trapezoid plan follows the awkward edges of the site.
Built in 1933 for a Nara timber wholesaler as house and office, this registered machiya faces the lane east of Gangoji. Fine figured wood lines its upstairs room.
Tomi Shrine Office, built in 1938 in Nara City, has a porch under a curved gable and a north room with an alcove for the envoy who attended the annual festival.