Japan's Historic Schools & Campus Landmarks

About this book

Every country keeps its memory in its schools. Japan built its modern self in them.

Japan's Historic Schools & Campus Landmarks is a complete guide to 200 school buildings, universities and learning places, every entry in one uniform format: the building and its place, its design, structure and history, exactly what to look for on site, and honest practical notes that never pretend a campus gate is always open. Eight parts walk the whole architecture of Japanese learning: the imperial universities and their great halls — the Yasuda Auditorium's brick tower, Kyoto's clock tower, the atomic-scarred science building of Hiroshima; the old-system higher schools, the dormitory republics that fed the empire's universities; the normal, commercial, agricultural and technical colleges that schooled a modernising nation; the preserved schoolhouses — Matsumoto's Kaichi tower of 1876, Japan's oldest wooden school, Vories' beloved Toyosato; the private and mission universities, from Waseda's subscription tower to a Kobe garden campus; the girls' schools and women's colleges that carried women's education from one rented room to the university; the domain schools and academies where learning began — Ashikaga, Mito, Aizu, and Yoshida Shoin's single classroom; and the closed, moved and reborn schools, including the memorial schoolhouses of the 2011 disaster coast, kept by their cities as testimony.

It is the companion, not the double, of Japanese Architecture: that book reads the styles, this one reads the schools. A four-pass method — gate, roof, plan, fabric — opens every entry, so that after this book any school building in Japan, listed or not, becomes legible.

Build the trip around the buildings where Japan learned. No country rewards it more.

Written and created in Japan by Japanese author Aki Wakamatsu. Published by Takikawa TOKOTOKO Kids LLC, a Japanese publisher in Hokkaido, Japan. Authentic Japanese content, carefully made in Japan — not mass-produced.