Shōwa

The chapel of Tohoku Gakuin in Sendai, dedicated in 1932 and named for an American donor, is a Collegiate Gothic building of tall pointed windows and pilasters.

Built in 1930 in Kyoto, the Aoki Family Residence Main House sets a stained-glass Western room at the street and a sukiya tatami wing behind. Registered 2014.

A mud-walled kura of just 13 square metres, the Aoki Family Residence Storehouse of 1930 faces the sukiya main house across a Kyoto courtyard. Registered in 2014.

A small tea house on Kaga Shotaro's Oyamazaki estate, its table-style tea seat doubling as a Buddhist chapel, opened only for seasonal tea gatherings.

A tiny teahouse on Kaga Shotaro's estate, a log-framed room projecting over a stone base set into the slope, a deft blend of West and Japan. Not normally open.

By the worship hall stands Amino Shrine's offering hall, an early-Showa building where offerings for the deities are prepared, plain but carefully made.

Wrapping around the main hall of Amino Shrine, this thirty-metre early-Showa openwork fence is solid below and latticed above, ringing the sacred inner ground.

Beside the approach to Amino Shrine stands its ablution pavilion, built in 1943 to mark the shrine's promotion to prefectural rank, open on all sides under a copper roof.

A short covered corridor linking the worship hall to the main hall of Amino Shrine, built around 1929. Its thin brackets and curved rafters show a delicate touch.

Spanning the Yura River in Ayabe, Kyoto, the Ayabe Ohashi Bridge is a 210-metre seven-span steel curved-chord Warren truss bridge completed in 1929. Designated a Registered Tangible Cultural Property in 2005, it remains in active service as a road bridge and stands as a rare and beautiful example of early-Showa civil engineering.

A 1936 single-storey house in Kyoto's Shishigatani, half-timbered outside and fitted with joinery from a passenger liner. Built by Konoike-gumi; registered 2004.

Izumo Daijingu's shrine office in Kameoka, Kyoto: a 1931 tiled building of 182 square meters with staggered tatami rooms, a railed veranda and chrysanthemum struts.

Izumo Daijingu's Kurodayu auxiliary shrine in Kameoka, Kyoto: a 1938 one-bay sanctuary outside the grounds, with chamfered posts and classical carved details.

Izumo Daijingu's corridors and openwork fence in Kameoka, Kyoto: an 1893 lattice fence and 1935 bark-roofed corridors that together enclose the main hall.

Izumo Daijingu's middle gate and norito hall in Kameoka, Kyoto: a 1934 four-legged gate and open prayer pavilion under cypress bark with a curved karahafu gable.

Built in 1945 at the Imamiya Shrine Otabisho in Kyoto, this large hall holds the mikoshi during the Imamiya Festival, with high central openings and a trussed roof.

Rising from the wooded foothills of Ayabe in northern Kyoto, Oomoto Mirokuden is a vast 789-tatami sanctuary completed in 1953 on the site of an earlier hall lost to wartime suppression. A registered Tangible Cultural Property of Japan since 2014, its pillar-less interior, layered copper-shingled irimoya roof, and surrounding gardens make it one of the great twentieth-century religious buildings of Japan.

Kaga Shōtarō's Tudor half-timber former garage beneath Mount Tennōzan, registered as a Cultural Property and now operated as a free rest house by Kyoto Prefecture on the wooded grounds of Ōyamazaki Sansō.

A 1934 bracketed gate fronting a Kitashirakawa villa by Fujii Koji, with a slatted transom, copper roof and a boulder set in its stone floor. Registered 2020.

A two-mat tea-room-style hut of 1937 in Kawai Kanjiro's courtyard, built of thick farmhouse timbers with a slatted ceiling and a well, used for thought, not tea.