Moka High School Memorial Hall

The Old Main Building of Tochigi's Third Middle School

Moka High School Memorial Hall (真岡高校記念館, Moka Koko Kinenkan, also written Mōka Kōkō Kinenkan) stands on the campus of Tochigi Prefectural Moka High School at Shirafugaoka in Moka, Tochigi Prefecture. Built in 1903 as the main building of the school, it was entered on Japan's list of Registered Tangible Cultural Properties on 23 July 1998.

The school itself opened in 1900. Tochigi already had two middle schools, the institutions that became today's Utsunomiya High School and Tochigi High School, and Moka was the third the prefecture established. A building put up three years into that history therefore carries the school's founding period in its timbers, which is why the alumni body treats it as more than an old classroom block.

One detail complicates the date. The school's own chronology records that a violent storm on 28 September 1902 destroyed the north and south classroom wings and the dormitory outright and left the main building badly out of plumb, and it places the rebuilding of the main building in January 1904, with the north wing finished in April 1903. The Agency for Cultural Affairs register gives 1903 for the structure now called the Memorial Hall. Anyone tracing the building's exact year will want to weigh the two records against each other.

Registered for Its Place in the Landscape

The building carries registration number 09-0006 and was recorded under the criterion "contributing to the historic landscape of the nation" (国土の歴史的景観に寄与しているもの). That category differs from the one applied to architecturally exemplary buildings; it recognises structures whose presence gives a place its historical character. The registration date is 23 July 1998, with the public notice following on 4 August. The owner is Tochigi Prefecture, which makes this a rare case of a working public high school holding a national cultural property on its grounds.

The Agency for Cultural Affairs describes it as a full two-storey structure under an irimoya (hip-and-gable) roof, timber-framed and tiled, with a building area of 744 square metres. Ground level held the administrative office, the staff room and the principal's room; the upper level was one large assembly hall. Both functions have shifted: the lower floor is now an exhibition room on the school's history and the upper floor still works as an auditorium.

Externally the vocabulary is plain. Horizontal weatherboarding painted white, sash windows that slide vertically rather than sideways, and an entrance porch carried on unusually thick round columns. The prefectural cultural properties register notes that the overall composition closely resembles the former main building of Utsunomiya High School, while the interior carries Japanese-style detailing in places, a mixture typical of Meiji-period public buildings that adopted Western massing without abandoning native carpentry habits. The Agency's summary connects that restraint to the school's ethos of plain living and moral firmness.

Two Relocations, One Earthquake, and Thirty-Two Jacks

The building has not stayed put. In 1968 it was moved to its present position beside the school's north gate and given the name Memorial Hall. A renovation followed in 2007.

Then came 11 March 2011. The Great East Japan Earthquake damaged the hall, and inspection found the foundation and the timber sills badly deteriorated. The work that followed is the most interesting chapter in the building's recent life. Rather than dismantling the structure, contractors used ageya, the traditional Japanese technique of lifting a building whole: thirty-two jacks raised the entire hall 2.3 metres so that the old foundation could be removed and a reinforced concrete one cast beneath it. The interior walls were replastered throughout and air conditioning went in. Otsuka Minoru, founder of Otsuka Corporation and a graduate of the school, funded the seismic retrofit with a donation of 147.26 million yen. The work was completed in 2015.

The result is a registered cultural property in daily use. Assemblies and meetings take place in the upper hall through the school year, which is unusual for a building of this age and status.

Visiting requires an application. The Tochigi prefectural cultural properties register lists the hall as open to viewing on request, and since the site is an operating high school, contact should go through the school rather than to a tourist office. The same register puts the walk from Moka Station on the Moka Railway at about five minutes. Photography inside, and any visit during class hours, should be cleared in advance. Nearby, Moka City Kubo Auditorium of 1938 offers a striking contrast: another registered school hall in the same city, designed thirty-five years later by a pupil of Frank Lloyd Wright.