Ube City Watanabe Memorial Hall

A Hall Built by Seven Companies for One Man

The Ube City Watanabe-Ō Memorial Hall opens onto a wide terrace where a single rectangular monument rises at the center of the steps, flanked by six concrete columns set three to a side. The columns are not ornament. Each stands for one of the seven local companies that paid for the building and then gave it, along with the park around it, to the city of Ube. The honorific "Ō" in the name means roughly "the venerable old gentleman," and the man being honored was Watanabe Yūsaku (1864–1934), a coal-mine operator born in what was then Ube village.

Watanabe built his fortune in the Okinoyama coalfield and went on to launch cement, chemical, banking, railway, and ironworking ventures that turned a coastal mining town into an industrial city. When he died in 1934, the businesses he had founded banded together to commemorate him. Construction began in October 1935, and the hall was completed in 1937, opening to the public that July.

The design came from Murano Tōgo (1891–1984), an architect who would later receive the Order of Culture in 1967 and join the Japan Art Academy in 1980. Murano had graduated from Waseda University in 1918 and trained under Watanabe Setsu before setting up his own practice in 1929. He was in his mid-forties when this hall was built, and he regarded it as one of the defining works of his prewar career.

Three Curving Walls and a Coal-Town Facade

Seen from the terrace, the front of the building is composed of three wall surfaces, each bent to a different curvature, that swing across the elevation rather than meeting in flat planes. At the center a canopy projects over the entrance, carried on cruciform columns finished in polished black granite. The side walls flanking the doors carry relief sculpture in artificial stone, and the figures worked into them are coal miners, a direct nod to the industry that paid for everything.

The skin of the building rewards close looking. Murano clad the exterior in brownish-black tiles roughly nine by eighteen centimeters, then broke the field with bands of vertically laid tile and pushed half-depth tiles out from the surface in places so that the wall catches raking light and throws small shadows. Around openings he switched materials, setting artificial-stone blocks and bare exposed concrete against the tile, and filling some windows with stacked glass block. For a building of the 1930s this was a deliberate display of new construction materials.

The auditorium volume reveals its structure honestly on the flanks, where the steel-reinforced concrete columns of the hall stand proud of the wall as visible piers. The whole composition belongs to a modernism that traces back to German Expressionist architecture, and it is usually read as one of the high points that prewar Japanese building reached.

Marble Lobbies and the "Airplane" Plan

Inside, the ground-floor lobby is set with freestanding round columns sheathed in marble figured with white cloud-like veining. Their capitals spread into flat concrete slabs, and the undersides are painted in graded tones that shift from one shade to the next. Climb to the second-floor lobby and the columns change material: here they are faced in Chōshū onyx, a stone from the region, and a tall void opens up between the column rows so the two levels read as a single airy space.

The plan as a whole is sometimes called the "airplane type." A lobby block, a fan-shaped auditorium, and a stage wing line up so that, viewed from above, the building spreads like an aircraft at rest. The auditorium was built for around 2,000 seats. A renovation carried out between 1992 and 1994 reduced and reworked the seating to roughly 1,360 places across two levels while keeping the original ceiling and the proscenium framing intact.

Acoustics are part of the building's reputation. It counts among the oldest concert halls in western Japan, and musicians have praised the sound for voice and instrument since its early years. The hall remains a working venue rather than a museum piece, and it continues to host concerts, ceremonies, and civic events.

Why It Is an Important Cultural Property

The hall was first listed as a Registered Tangible Cultural Property in June 1997, and then raised to the status of nationally designated Important Cultural Property on December 27, 2005. The designation cites two grounds: that the work is outstanding in design, and that it carries high historical value.

Both grounds point at the same thing. As a piece of design the building shows Murano handling curved masonry, tactile tilework, and rich interior stone with a confidence that few Japanese architects of the period could match. As a historical document it records the wealth and ambition of an industrial city at its prewar peak, financed by coal and cement money and dedicated to the man who generated it. In 2007 the building was further recognized as part of a group of modernization industrial heritage sites tied to the coal industry of Kyushu and Yamaguchi.

Around the Hall

The hall sits in Watanabe-Ō Memorial Park at the western edge, very close to Ube-Shinkawa Station on the JR Ube Line, which makes it an easy stop on foot from the train. Free parking for about 138 vehicles is shared with the adjacent Ube Municipal Cultural Center.

Film fans may recognize the entrance lobby. In 2007 the production of Always: Sunset on Third Street 2 used the marble-columned foyer as a 1950s Ginza cinema, dressing the entrance with vintage film boards and filling it with some 360 local residents recruited as extras. Beyond the hall, Ube is known for the open-air sculpture displays of Tokiwa Park and as the hometown of animation director Hideaki Anno, so the city pairs well with a longer day out.

Because this is an active rental venue, the interior is not on permanent open display. Visitors who want to see inside should check the schedule of public performances or contact the management office in advance about access; the surrounding park and the terrace with its monument and columns can be seen freely from outside at any time.