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.
The Shima Shrine Shinmon Gate and Flanking Walls in Wakayama City are a 1944 four-legged gate with 16 meters of latticed walls at the approach, registered in 2024.
The Shima Shrine Temizusha in Wakayama City is a 1944 water pavilion of 5.8 square meters with inward-leaning posts and daibutsuyo-style beam ends; registered 2024.
The Shima Shrine Worship Hall in Wakayama City is a 1944 irimoya hall with a cusped-gable porch, a coffered ceiling, and an attached prayer hall, registered in 2024.
Built in 1933 for Koyasan's eleven hundredth Kobo Daishi memorial, this bead merchant's shop carries a temple-style karahafu gable and still trades daily as a shop.
Jokiin Sanmon on Koyasan is a four-legged gate of about 1955 in cypress, with deliberately archaic carving. Free to view from the street. Registered 2025.
A single-storey guest wing in Gobo, Wakayama, with its own entrance and kitchen, cypress rooms of 12.5 and 10 mats, a fan-carved transom and a tea room of 1959-60.
A gently curving 20-metre cut-stone wall of the early Showa years, laid in 4 courses with plum-crest motifs, edging a shrine family's homestead in Wakayama.
A 1937 gate, 3 bays and 4.0 m wide, roofed in cedar bark, framing the front of a shrine family's homestead in rural Wakayama. Registered 2013; seen from the lane.
A 1937 roofed wall, 22 metres in all, of black plaster with crisp white edging above vertical boarding, flanking the gate of a shrine family's homestead in Wakayama.
A two-storey timber annex of about 1953 on the Sono estate in Gobo, with pantiled roof and board walls; its upstairs window looks to the river. Registered in 2024.
Rebuilt in 1953, the Entrance Building of the former Tajima lacquer refinery in Kainan pairs a washed-mortar base and yellow render with an exposed steel truss.
This early Showa wooden wing at the former Tajima lacquer works in Kainan holds 2 dining rooms, a kitchen and a bath beside an earthen passage to the workshop.
Built in 1934, this 2-story clay-walled kura in Kainan kept costly raw lacquer safe from summer spoilage, with high iron-shuttered windows and a king post truss.
Raised in 1927, this brick hall in Kainan is where refined lacquer was packed into barrels; in 1958 its termite-hit sawtooth roof became riveted steel trusses.
At 867 metres, this 1928 timber station is Koyasan's rail gateway: early-Showa round windows under a pyramidal roof topped by a sacred jewel, restored in 2015.
Built around 1929 by a Kishu lacquerware dealer, this two-story house in black lime plaster stands in Kainan's Funao district near the Kuroe lacquer town. Registered 2019.
A 26-meter concrete wall and set-back gate in washed-out mortar enclose the garden of the 1929 Hatada residence in Kainan, a modern corner-lot estate. Registered 2019.
In Iwade, Wakayama, the Fukuda Residence inner wall is black-plastered on the approach side and white on the garden side, an early Shōwa Registered Cultural Property.
A single-bay yakuimon in Iwade, Wakayama, the Fukuda Family Residence Gate was rebuilt in 1950 from timber salvaged when the older gate burned. Now registered.
Completed in 1927 at Hirai in Kozagawa, Wakayama, this H-plan timber building was drawn in Sapporo for Hokkaido University's only forest outside Hokkaido.