Former Wakayama Junior High School Library (Toin High School Alumni Hall)

A Small Modern Building at the Old North Gate

The Former Wakayama Junior High School Library (旧制和歌山中学校図書館, Kyūsei Wakayama Chūgakkō Toshokan), now the Toin High School Alumni Hall, is a single-storey reinforced-concrete building of 1929 standing on the campus of Wakayama Prefectural Toin High School in Fukiage, Wakayama City, and was entered on Japan's National Register of Tangible Cultural Properties on 4 February 2021.

What survives is the reading room. The building occupies the centre of the northern part of the site, facing west, just inside where the main gate stood when the campus was laid out. Its floor area is 125 square metres under a flat roof, which in 1929 still counted as a declaration of intent: no tiles, no ridge, no eaves in the traditional sense.

The west porch is where the design puts its weight. Thick round columns carry a horizontal canopy that thins as it projects, and a run of moulding beneath the canopy pushes the eye sideways rather than up. Handrails flank the approach. Above, at the centre of the front wall, the emblem of the old junior high school is worked in mortar.

Along the flanks, tall narrow windows repeat at close intervals and pull the building backwards into its own depth.

The detailing goes further down than most visitors expect. The ventilation grilles at floor level carry the character 中, the second character of Wakayama Chūgakkō, set into the pattern. Somebody thought about the part of the building nearest the ground.

Paid For by Parents, for a Fiftieth Anniversary

Wakayama Junior High School opened in March 1879 as the prefecture's first public middle school, moved to the western bailey of Wakayama Castle in 1889, and settled on the present site in April 1915. By the late 1920s it had a national reputation, much of it earned on the baseball field.

The fiftieth anniversary fell in 1929. The parents' association funded a library as its gift, and the building was completed on 8 June that year, five months before the anniversary celebrations proper, which ran over five days in November and included a procession of a thousand pupils carrying small flags through the streets of the city.

No record of the architect or the contractor has been found. For a building of this quality that absence is a little frustrating, and it means the design has to be read from the fabric alone.

The reading room served as the school library from 1930 until the late 1970s. When a new library was completed in May 1977 as part of a wider rebuilding of the campus, the old building was converted: the stack room behind the reading room was removed, and in May 1978 it reopened as the Alumni Hall, marking the centenary of the founding of Wakayama Junior High School and thirty years of Toin High School. The exterior of the reading room came through that work largely as built.

It is used today for club activities and meetings.

Why It Was Registered

The building holds registration number 30-0289, announced in the ninety-seventh round of registrations on 4 February 2021, under the criterion of contributing to the historic landscape of the nation. The Agency for Cultural Affairs describes it as a modern building of plain and clear design.

Registered Tangible Cultural Property status is deliberately light-touch. It applies to structures roughly fifty years old or older, assumes they will stay in use, and asks owners to notify the authorities before substantial alteration rather than freezing the fabric. A school hall in weekly use is exactly the kind of building the system was written for.

Wakayama Prefecture owns the building. Local reporting at the time noted that the school had begun the process with this building in mind, and that the athletic grounds terrace on the same campus was added to the application at the suggestion of an Agency officer; both were registered together, and a commemorative pamphlet was issued on 1 March 2021.

Seeing the Building

Toin High School operates as a normal secondary school, so the Alumni Hall has no opening hours, no admission charge and no visitor programme. Anyone who wants to look at it should contact the school office in advance and say why. Turning up at the gate during term time will not work.

From outside the campus, a panel recording the registration has been fixed to the brick wall south of the main gate since February 2021. An explanatory board for this building was unveiled on campus in March of the same year, alongside boards for the athletic grounds terrace and the Nomura Kichisaburō inscription monument. A stone monument carved with the Wakayama Junior High School song, put up for the 120th anniversary in 1999, stands in front of the hall.

Photography from the public road is unrestricted; photography on campus requires permission.

To get there, take a Wakayama Bus service from JR Wakayama Station or Nankai Wakayamashi Station, get off at Komatsubara 5-chōme and walk five minutes east. Wakayama Castle is close enough to combine in one outing, and the western bailey where the school stood between 1889 and 1915 now carries an explanatory board about the old school, installed in March 2022 near a camphor tree planted by the class of 1896.