Gakushikai Hall

Gakushi Kaikan: A 1928 Clubhouse on the Birthplace of Tokyo University

Walk north from Jimbocho Station along Hakusan-dori, turn east just before Kyoritsu Women's University, and a heavy five-story building wrapped in russet scratch-tile rises on the corner. This is Gakushi Kaikan, the clubhouse built in 1928 for Gakushikai, the alumni association of Japan's seven former Imperial Universities.

Completed five years after the Great Kanto Earthquake of 1923, the building was one of the early Japanese works to use steel-reinforced concrete (SRC) construction throughout. It rises five floors above ground with one basement, occupying a footprint of 1,839 square meters. The Agency for Cultural Affairs registered it as a Registered Tangible Cultural Property on January 31, 2003.

From the street, three things stand out: the semicircular arch over the main entrance, the rhythmic contrast between the linear window bays of the second and third floors and the curved bays of the fourth, and the scratch-tile cladding that catches the light differently as the day turns.

One important caveat: the building is currently closed. A redevelopment project shuttered the doors on December 29, 2024, with a planned reopening around 2030. Visitors today can only view the exterior, but understanding what this building has been — and what is about to happen to it — makes the street-level view considerably more interesting.

Why This Site? Tokyo University and Japanese Baseball

The plot is not just another corner of Kanda. In 1877, the schools that stood here — Tokyo Kaisei School and Tokyo Medical School — were merged to form Tokyo University. When Tokyo University was restructured into the Imperial University in 1886, alumni gathered to honor the retirement of its first president, Hiroyuki Kato. That gathering became the seed of Gakushikai itself.

Today the association brings together graduates of the seven former Imperial Universities — Hokkaido, Tohoku, Tokyo, Nagoya, Kyoto, Osaka, and Kyushu — and the building was conceived as their social home.

There is a second layer of history. Horace Wilson, an American teacher hired by Tokyo Kaisei School, taught his students baseball during recess on this same ground in the 1870s. A monument erected in 2003 commemorates this as the birthplace of baseball in Japan. The site, in other words, holds two foundational stories — modern Japanese higher education and the country's national sport — overlapping in one square block of Kanda.

Teitaro Takahashi and "A Home to Return To"

The first Gakushi Kaikan was a Meiji-era wooden Western-style building that burned down in a major fire in Kanda Misakicho. Plans to rebuild were interrupted by the 1923 earthquake, and a fresh design competition was held in 1925. The winner was Teitaro Takahashi, a 33-year-old architect from Hikone who had graduated at the top of his class at Tokyo Imperial University's School of Architecture and received the silver watch of the Emperor's Award.

Takahashi handled the design; his former professor Toshikata Sano — a founding figure of reinforced-concrete engineering in Japan — handled the structure. The pairing matched the brief: the building had to embody the lessons of the earthquake while still feeling intimate enough to serve as a private club.

Takahashi described his concept as "a home for members to return to." The entrance hall is deliberately modest in relation to the overall scale of the building. Functions are stacked vertically as if in a large private residence: living rooms on the first floor, reception rooms on the second, studies on the third, and bedrooms on the fourth.

In 1937, Akira Fujimura of the Mitsubishi Goshi real-estate division designed the New Wing as an extension. He set its facade back from the original and used the same combination of stone base and scratch-tile cladding to honor Takahashi's earlier work. Where the Old Wing has its commanding semicircular arch, the New Wing offers a lighter porte-cochere with a canopy. The two entrances, almost a decade apart in age and noticeably different in character, sat side by side along the street for some eighty-five years.

Why It Was Registered: Scratch Tile and the Geometry of the Facade

The Agency for Cultural Affairs registered Gakushi Kaikan under the criterion "exemplary in design" — recognition that the building shaped subsequent Japanese architecture of the late 1920s and 1930s.

Scratch tile, the cladding material that gives the exterior its distinctive texture, was a transitional product between brick and modern facing tile. The narrow grooves cut into each unworked, unglazed face catch shadow rather than reflecting light, lending the wall a quiet, mineral depth. The technique enjoyed peak popularity between 1928 and 1931 on government buildings, university halls, and bank headquarters. Gakushi Kaikan is one of the canonical surviving examples.

The facade itself is composed in two registers. The second and third stories use straight, regimented windows that march evenly across the wall. The fourth story softens into curves. Read alongside the floor plan — studies and bedrooms occupy the upper floors — this transition translates a shift from public to private use into the language of geometry.

Inside, the staircase hall was supported by twelve-sided columns with rivet-like detailing in the manner of the Vienna Secession movement, a Central European cousin of Art Nouveau that had filtered into Japanese architectural fashion by the late Taisho period. Paired with the marble floor of the entrance hall, these columns gave first-time visitors a sharp, modern note within an otherwise residential atmosphere.

One more detail worth knowing: the foundation rests on roughly 1,300 wooden pine piles, the same pre-modern technique discovered when the Marunouchi Building near Tokyo Station was dismantled. Recent surveys found no significant decay in the Gakushi Kaikan piles. Pine logs and steel-reinforced concrete in the same building — a quiet record of how earthquake-era Tokyo combined inherited and imported technologies.

2025: A Higher Designation, and What Comes Next

On March 26, 2025, Gakushi Kaikan was designated as a Tokyo Metropolitan Tangible Cultural Property (Building). The national-level registration of 2003 was already in place; the new metropolitan designation provides a stronger framework of protection that will carry through and beyond the redevelopment.

The plan itself is unusual. The Old Wing will be physically relocated — moved by the traditional hikiya house-moving technique — then seismically retrofitted and preserved as part of a new development. The 1937 New Wing, however, will be demolished. The project also accommodates a planned widening of Hakusan-dori and is being carried out jointly with the owner of the adjacent SC Kanda Nishikicho 3-chome Building. Kashima Corporation serves as construction partner. The new complex is scheduled to open around 2030.

For visitors who cannot wait that long, Gakushikai has worked with the Cultural Heritage Conservation Planning Office, Mitsubishi Jisho Sekkei, Hacosco, and others to produce the Gakushi Kaikan Digital Archive. The project documents both wings before closure using 360-degree video, VR, and virtual tours of the staircase hall, the marble entrance, and the ballrooms — including the celebrated Room 201, which preserved much of its 1920s atmosphere as a former reception room.

The Neighborhood

With the interior closed, a visit today is necessarily a walking visit. Fortunately, Kanda and Jimbocho reward walking better than almost any other district in Tokyo.

South of Gakushi Kaikan along Hakusan-dori lies Kanda Jimbocho, one of the largest secondhand book quarters in the world. Roughly 130 affiliated shops line Yasukuni-dori and the side streets, each with its own specialty — old maps, fine arts, Western books, manga, classical Japanese literature, technical journals. Half a day is not enough.

The area is also rich in interwar architecture. Within walking distance are the former Kudan Kaikan (now reopened as Kudan Kaikan Terrace), heritage office buildings around Hitotsubashi, and the wider Marunouchi-Otemachi business district where Meiji and Taisho era landmarks are interleaved with contemporary towers. A walking tour built around 1920s–1930s architecture is easy to plan from this corner.

The Chinese restaurant that operated inside Gakushi Kaikan has also closed during the building's hiatus. The surrounding streets, however, are famous as one of Tokyo's most competitive lunch zones, with celebrated curry shops, old-style yoshoku restaurants, and tonkatsu specialists active throughout the workweek.