Furukawa Kakemizu Club

Furukawa Kakemizu Club

The Furukawa Kakemizu Club (古河掛水倶楽部) at Kakemizu on the right bank of the Watarase River in Ashiomachi, Nikko City, Tochigi Prefecture, is a group of buildings of the Ashio Copper Mine; its early Taisho new building and late Meiji old building were registered as Registered Tangible Cultural Properties on October 18, 2006, and the mining office archive of 1907 and the telephone exchange of 1951 on November 29, 2016 (Agency for Cultural Affairs). All four are owned by Furukawa Co., Ltd.

The archive was built when the heart of the mine's operations moved to Kakemizu, and the Agency calls it a rare survival of the mine's central facilities. A telephone line was installed at the mine in 1886, the first private telephone in Japan (Agency for Cultural Affairs).

The Four Buildings

The new building faces the river on stone piers like a hillside hall, with a games room to the west and a half-timbered upper floor. The old building, joined to it by a corridor, is a single-storey clapboard building with a great tatami hall and Western rooms (Agency for Cultural Affairs).

The archive is a two-storey brick building in English bond with white-banded corner pilasters, and the telephone exchange is a small building of mortar walls and tall windows that looks like a modern house of its day (Agency for Cultural Affairs). Each building is described on its own page.

Visiting

No official information on public access was found.