A Taishō School Building That Outlived Its Purpose
The Memorial Hall of Saitama Prefectural Fukaya Commercial High School (埼玉県立深谷商業高等学校記念館, known locally as Nisōrō 二層楼) is a wooden school building of 1922 in Haragō, Fukaya City, Saitama Prefecture, added to the national register as a Registered Tangible Cultural Property on 18 October 2000.
Approach it from Route 17 and the first thing that resolves is the tower. A small belvedere rises from the centre of the roof, directly above a porte-cochère, and everything else arranges itself around that vertical line. Two wings extend left and right in mirror image. Four dormer windows break the tiled roof slope. At each end of the building a curved pediment caps the wall.
The name Nisōrō means, roughly, the two-storeyed tower, and it entered the school song rather than the official record. Students have been singing about it for a century.
The school opened in April 1921 as a municipal commercial school, the result of sustained lobbying by local figures including Shibusawa Eiichi, the Fukaya-born industrialist who founded Japan's first modern bank and now appears on the ten-thousand yen note, and Ōtani Tōyū, a prefectural assemblyman and town mayor who put local development ahead of a national political career. The building was finished the following April, on the fifteenth day of the month. Fukaya was a town of some twenty thousand people at the time. The scale of what it built for its commercial students says a good deal about how much the project mattered locally.
For more than forty years this was the main classroom building. A reinforced concrete block replaced it in that role in the mid-1960s, and in 1981, at the school's sixtieth anniversary, the old building was reopened as a memorial hall.
French Renaissance in Timber, and Why That Earned Registration
The register cites a specific ground for this building: that its design constitutes a standard of its kind. Of the three criteria under which a property can be registered, this is the one that speaks to architectural quality rather than to landscape or to rarity of technique.
What earned it is the density of the design. The exterior is a timber frame clad in horizontal boarding, roofed in tile, with a building area of 608 square metres. Onto that thoroughly Japanese carpentry tradition the designer grafted a French Renaissance vocabulary: the symmetrical composition around a central tower and carriage porch, the dormers, the segmental pediments at the wing ends. Inside, white plaster walls and tall sash windows continue the European reading, while the joinery underneath is the work of Japanese carpenters using Japanese methods. Buildings of this kind, called wayō setchū (和洋折衷, a blending of Japanese and Western), were common in the Meiji and Taishō periods. Complete surviving examples of Taishō-period wooden schoolhouses are not, and this one is often described as the only intact example in Saitama Prefecture.
It should be said clearly that registration and designation are different things. A Registered Tangible Cultural Property is not an Important Cultural Property, still less a National Treasure. Registration, introduced in 1996, covers buildings of roughly fifty years or more and asks owners to notify rather than seek permission before making changes, on the reasoning that a building in continuing use stands a better chance than one frozen. This building carries register number 11-0024, entered in the twenty-sixth round, with the public notice following on 6 November 2000.
One further fact emerged only during later repair work. The ridge tablet, the wooden board recording those responsible for a building's construction, named the designer as Hamana Genkichi, an engineer employed by Saitama Prefecture. Until then his identity had been unknown. The contractor was the Inoue-gumi of Takasaki in Gunma Prefecture, the firm that built the great Takasaki Kannon statue.
The Green That Nobody Remembered
By the end of the 2000s the building was in poor condition. Conservation repairs began in September 2011 and ran for about two years.
During the investigation that accompanies any such project, paint analysis turned up something that no living person recalled. The exterior had not originally been the pale, whitish colour that generations of graduates remembered. It had been green. The restoration returned the boarding to that original tone, and the building that reopened looked, to almost everyone who had known it, like a different structure. Accounts describe the shade variously, as a triple-green or a yellow-green in the traditional Japanese colour vocabulary, and the exact name is better treated as unsettled than asserted.
The interior repays a slow walk. A wall clock made by Seikosha, the ancestor of Seiko, still hangs inside. The second-floor corridor runs between white plaster and sash windows that lift vertically in their frames. There is a preserved principal's office and a room of school-history material tracing a century of commercial education. In the grounds stands a pine planted by Shibusawa Eiichi in October 1922, when he came to lecture in the newly finished building; on the same visit he wrote out two phrases, one meaning utmost sincerity and the other calling for the spirit of the samurai together with the talent of the merchant, and both became the school's mottoes.
The hall is open to the public every Sunday, from 10:00 to 12:00 and again from 13:00 to 15:00, with closures over the New Year period and occasionally at other times. There is no charge. Because this is a working high school, weekday visits are not possible, and anyone travelling a distance should check the school's website before setting out. From Fukaya Station on the JR Takasaki Line the walk takes about fifteen minutes.
Television has helped its profile lately. In 2023 the exterior stood in for the Meiji-era University of Tokyo in an NHK morning drama serial, and visitor numbers rose accordingly.
Fukaya rewards a full day. The red brick of Fukaya Station itself echoes Tokyo Station, whose bricks came from a factory here; the surviving kilns and buildings of that brickworks are designated Important Cultural Properties, as is Seishidō, a hall associated with Shibusawa. The Shibusawa Eiichi Memorial Museum and his birthplace, Nakanchi, are a short drive out of the centre.
- 📍 Plan Your Visit to Saitama
- Find tours, activities & transport passes near Saitama Prefectural Fukaya Commercial High School Memorial
- [ Kawagoe Little Edo & Moominvalley Park ]
Q&A
- When can I visit the Memorial Hall of Saitama Prefectural Fukaya Commercial High School?
- Every Sunday, from 10:00 to 12:00 and from 13:00 to 15:00. It closes over the New Year period and occasionally on other dates, so check the school website before travelling. Weekday visits are not possible because the building sits inside an operating high school campus.
- Is there an admission fee for the Memorial Hall of Saitama Prefectural Fukaya Commercial High School?
- No. Entry is free during the published Sunday opening hours. No advance booking is required for individual visitors, though groups may wish to contact the school in advance on 048-571-3321.
- Is the Memorial Hall of Saitama Prefectural Fukaya Commercial High School an Important Cultural Property?
- No. It is a Registered Tangible Cultural Property, registered on 18 October 2000 under number 11-0024. Registration is a lighter, notification-based system distinct from designation as an Important Cultural Property or National Treasure.
- How do I get to the Memorial Hall of Saitama Prefectural Fukaya Commercial High School?
- The school lies at 80 Haragō, Fukaya City, about fifteen minutes on foot from Fukaya Station on the JR Takasaki Line, which is roughly seventy minutes from Ueno. The site is on Route 17 near the centre of town.
- What connects Shibusawa Eiichi to the Memorial Hall of Saitama Prefectural Fukaya Commercial High School?
- Shibusawa, a native of Fukaya, was among those who worked to establish the school, which opened in 1921. In October 1922 he lectured in the newly completed building, planted a pine that still stands in the grounds, and wrote out the two phrases that became the school mottoes.
Basic Information
| Name | Memorial Hall of Saitama Prefectural Fukaya Commercial High School (埼玉県立深谷商業高等学校記念館), also known as Nisōrō |
|---|---|
| Location | 80 Haragō, Fukaya City, Saitama Prefecture |
| Designation | Registered Tangible Cultural Property (Structure), register no. 11-0024 |
| Year Designated | Registered 18 October 2000; public notice 6 November 2000 (26th round) |
| Quantity | 1 building |
| Dimensions | Two-storey timber frame, tiled roof, with roof tower; building area 608 m² |
| Owner | Saitama Prefecture |
| Public Access | Open Sundays 10:00 to 12:00 and 13:00 to 15:00, free of charge; closed over New Year and occasionally otherwise |
References
- Agency for Cultural Affairs — National Cultural Properties Database, Memorial Hall of Saitama Prefectural Fukaya Commercial High School
- https://kunishitei.bunka.go.jp/heritage/detail/101/00001900
- Cultural Heritage Online — Memorial Hall of Saitama Prefectural Fukaya Commercial High School
- https://online.bunka.go.jp/heritages/detail/186630
- Saitama Prefectural Fukaya Commercial High School — Visiting Nisōrō
- https://fukasyo-ch.spec.ed.jp/お知らせ/二層楼見学について
- Saitama Prefectural Fukaya Commercial High School — Access
- https://fukasyo-ch.spec.ed.jp/
- Fukaya Meguri — Saitama Prefectural Fukaya Commercial High School, Nisōrō
- https://fukayameguri.jp/spot/cat3/埼玉県立深谷商業高等学校 二層楼.html
Last verified: 2026.08.10