Gakushuin North Annex (former Library)

Gakushuin North Annex: A Meiji Library That Outlived Its Twin

Step a few minutes from Mejiro Station along the JR Yamanote Line and you enter a campus that still keeps a handful of buildings from the era when Gakushuin was a school for the Imperial family and the peerage. Among them, the North Annex stands a little apart, half-hidden in a grove of trees just inside the campus. It is a low, white-painted wooden building with a steep tiled roof — and once you notice the carved sakura blossoms decorating its brackets, you understand it was made specifically for this institution and no other.

The building was completed in 1909 (Meiji 42) as the school's library, one year after Gakushuin moved to Mejiro from its previous site in Yotsuya. It is a registered Tangible Cultural Property of Japan, listed on 28 April 2009 under the Ministry of Cultural Affairs registry, and is one of seven Gakushuin campus buildings to hold that status.

A School for the Peerage, and the Library at Its Centre

Gakushuin traces its origin to a learning hall set up in 1847 within the Kyoto Imperial Palace for the children of court nobles. In 1877 it reopened in Tokyo as the Kazoku Gakkō, or Peers' School, on the express wish of Emperor Meiji. For most of its pre-war existence it operated under the Imperial Household Ministry rather than the Ministry of Education, and the children of the kazoku — Japan's modern nobility, ranked from prince down to baron — could attend free of charge.

The Mejiro campus opened in 1908 (Meiji 41) after years of preparation, becoming the third location for the middle and higher schools. The library followed a year later. It was designed by Kuru Masamichi (1855–1914), one of the most influential architects in the Ministry of Education's building section. Kuru had earlier collaborated with Yamaguchi Hanroku on the Tokyo Music School Sōgakudō concert hall in Ueno (1890, now an Important Cultural Property) and had led the design of the Imperial Library, today preserved as the International Library of Children's Literature. The Gakushuin commission came late in his career, after he had spent two decades shaping the look of Japan's higher-education buildings.

Stick Style on a Japanese Roof

What makes the North Annex visually unusual is the cladding system. The walls are an example of Stick Style, an American timber idiom that emerged in the second half of the nineteenth century. It exposes the vertical structural members on the outside, with horizontal and diagonal strips of wood applied over the cladding so that the wall reads almost like a basketwork frame. Stick Style was common on the American East Coast around 1860–1880; in Japan it is rare, and the North Annex is one of the few surviving large-scale public examples.

Crowning the wooden frame is a thoroughly Japanese roof — a steep gable of sangawara tiles, the pantile-style ceramic roofing that became standard for late-Meiji institutional buildings. The combination is deliberate. Wooden strips and lap siding handle the walls in the imported style; the roof and the tiles speak the local language. Look closely at the eaves and at the ventilation grilles set just above ground level: each is cut in the form of a five-petalled cherry blossom, the school crest. The detail repeats around the entire perimeter, an architectural watermark identifying the building as Gakushuin's and no one else's.

The building has a single storey and an L-shaped plan that measures roughly 25 metres in each direction, with a total floor area of 393 square metres. The roof pitch is unusually steep for a Japanese building of this scale, giving the silhouette a slightly Alpine quality among the surrounding trees.

The Right Wing That Was Lost

The North Annex did not always look like this. In its original form it was a symmetrical, butterfly-plan building — two wings flanking a central entrance, with a separate brick-built stack room for the book collection at the back. Architects and historians use the Japanese term hiyoku-gata ("paired-wing form") to describe the layout. Photographs from the early twentieth century show a far larger and more imposing structure than what stands today.

In 1978 (Shōwa 53), the construction of the new Literature Department building (Kita 2 Building) on the campus required the removal of the library's right wing and the brick stack. The remaining left wing and central section were dismantled and rebuilt on the present site nearby, producing the L-shaped footprint that survives. A further renovation in 1997 stabilised the structure for continued use. What you see today, in other words, is roughly half of the original library, moved and reassembled — a quiet survivor of the campus's expansion.

Visiting the Building

The North Annex is owned by the Gakushuin School Corporation and is used as offices and a reading room for university researchers; it is not a museum and the interior is not on regular public view. Until recently, the building housed the offices of the Gakushuin University Archives Museum (Shiryōkan), which had been based here since 1975. In spring 2025, however, the archives moved to the newly renovated former university library — itself a 1960 modernist work by Maekawa Kunio — and reopened as the Kasumi Kaikan Memorial Gakushuin Museum.

For visitors, the building is essentially an outdoor architectural sight. The Mejiro campus is open to the general public for walking, provided you register briefly at the guardhouse by the gate. Most of the registered cultural properties — the main gate, the East Annex (former Imperial Family dormitory), the Nogi-kan (former student dormitory associated with General Nogi Maresuke), the stables, and several classroom buildings — can be reached on foot in under twenty minutes, and the North Annex is one of the quieter stops along the way.

Spring brings cherry blossoms across the campus, providing an apt setting for a building decorated with sakura motifs. Autumn light through the gingko and zelkova trees outside the annex is equally photogenic. Try walking around the entire perimeter rather than viewing only from one side: the carving of the ventilation grilles repeats but is not always in the same condition, and the roof angle reads very differently from each side.

What to See Nearby

The campus itself rewards a slow visit. Six other registered structures stand within walking distance: the main gate of 1908, the East Annex (1913, formerly an Imperial Family dormitory), the South Building No. 1 of 1927 in Neo-Gothic style, the West Building No. 1 of 1930, the Nogi-kan and the stables of 1908. Together they form one of the largest concentrations of registered cultural property buildings on any Japanese university campus.

Further afield, Mejiro Garden — a strolling-style Japanese garden created on the grounds of a former Imperial Family residence — lies about ten minutes' walk north of the station, with an Edo-style teahouse and a small pond. South of the campus, the Eisei Bunko Museum holds the Hosokawa family's collection of swords, paintings, and tea utensils. For Western architecture from a slightly earlier generation, the Hatoyama Hall (Onden) in Bunkyō ward is a thirty-minute taxi ride away and was the residence of three generations of prime ministers.