Retro Japan: Elegant Kobe College architecture designed to influence students
NISHINOMIYA, Hyogo -- Standing in style, Kobe College buildings in this western Japan city were designed to inspire class among its students in the early Showa era (1926-1989), and they still retain their dignity.
Passing through the reddish-tiled main gate and ascending a slope, one is greeted by the refined school buildings of Kobe College. The campus harmonizes with its natural surroundings and still retains 12 buildings designed by William Merrell Vories (1880-1964), who left behind many renowned architectural works. Under Vories' design philosophy, which posited that the grace of buildings positively influences students, the college was completed in 1933.
Near the center of the campus is the cream-colored Administration Building, constructed in the Spanish Mission style. It is connected via interior corridors to the auditorium and chapel, forming a single structure with three functions. The auditorium features semicircular arch that separates the stage from the seating area, creating a space with a sense of grandeur. The chapel's windows use amber-colored glass, which bathes the interior in golden light. This seems to reflect Vories' architectural spirit aimed at distinguished architecture that nurtures a loving heart.
The campus architecture is open to the public several times a year on an irregular basis. During these times, trained students act as "tour meisters" to explain the charm of the buildings.
(Japanese original by Maiko Umeda, Osaka Photo and Video Department)
* * *
The Japanese version of this article was originally published on Feb. 5, 2023.
* * *
This series explores Japan's architectural wonders and secrets of yesteryear. Read more Retro Japan articles here.
Hashtags
Try Our AI Features
Explore what Daily8 AI can do for you:
Comments
No comments yet...
Related Articles
Japan Today
13 hours ago
- Japan Today
A-bomb trees carrying on aging survivors' legacy as silent witnesses
Chikara Horiguchi, the master gardener of atomic-bombed trees in Hiroshima, is pictured with an eucalyptus at Hiroshima Castle that survived the 1945 U.S. atomic bombing. By Donican Lam Looking at the leafy weeping willow standing on the banks of a serene river in Hiroshima, one would never guess it endured the blast of the U.S. atomic attack on the city almost 80 years ago in the closing days of World War II. At around 370 meters from the explosion on Aug. 6, 1945, the willow is recognized by the city government as the closest surviving tree to the hypocenter. Like many other trees, it was reduced to little more than a charred stump or bare roots at the time but demonstrated a remarkable will for life by regrowing. As atomic bomb survivors age and fewer are able to share their experiences, increasing attention has turned to these surviving trees as silent witnesses. For some, the trees may also offer a more approachable way to engage with Hiroshima's painful past. "When people talk about the atomic bombing, it often comes across as very harsh and raw -- it's a powerful and direct subject. Sometimes those stories are necessary, too. But when we use trees as a kind of buffer in the conversation, the message comes across more gently and softly," said Chikara Horiguchi, the 80-year-old master gardener of so-called atomic-bombed trees in Hiroshima. Horiguchi, a native of Miyazaki Prefecture in southwestern Japan, became Hiroshima Prefecture's first certified arborist in 1992. While he initially hoped to work with private gardens, he realized that overseeing greenery in the city is itself an act of advocating for peace. Currently, around 160 trees standing within 2 kilometers of ground zero are registered by the Hiroshima city government as remaining "survivors" of the blast, based on the testimonies of residents and on-site investigations. Demonstrating the impact of the weapons of mass destruction, a study conducted more than a decade ago found that the vast majority of single-trunk trees leant toward the hypocenter due to slower growth on the more exposed side. In some cases, the trees have served as a beacon of hope for people who experienced the tragedy. Chinese parasol trees, now taking root in the Hiroshima Peace Memorial Park, became symbolic of survival following the testimony of Suzuko Numata, who lost her left leg in the wake of the blast and her fiance in the war. Numata, who died in 2011 at the age of 87, had devoted herself to telling visitors of how the tree had given her the will to continue living after seeing it bud again following the bombing. At that time, it was located in the courtyard of the Hiroshima post and telecommunications bureau where she worked. The "aogiri" tree, as the species is named in Japanese, was transplanted to the memorial park in 1973 from its original location 1.3 km away from the hypocenter, and became the catalyst for distributing seeds and saplings throughout the city and abroad. Efforts to spread the trees' message of peace beyond Japan have continued for over a decade under a global volunteer initiative called Green Legacy Hiroshima, which is backed by entities including a U.N. training arm in support of sustainable development goals. "I think no other living thing can convey some of the spirit of the hibaku-jumoku," said Nassrine Azimi, a co-founder of the initiative who formerly served as the first director of the Hiroshima office of U.N. Institute for Training and Research, referring to the Japanese word meaning "atomic-bombed trees." "You send a seed, you put it in a package, off it goes, and then six months later we get photos from the world," she said during a recent interview in Hiroshima. Green Legacy Hiroshima has delivered seeds of such trees to around 140 locations in over 40 countries while working with partners around the world, including an anti-nuclear weapons group in Oregon launched by Hiroshima atomic bomb survivor Hideko Tamura-Snider. The 91-year-old recalled the challenges when trying to get the seed-planting project started in the northwestern U.S. state of Oregon, where she lives, noting during an online interview that "nobody was interested" at first. Thanks to her perseverance, however, there are now over 55 second-generation atomic-bombed trees planted in Oregon -- reportedly the densest population outside Japan. Tamura-Snider was just 11 years old on the day of the atomic bombing, which took the life of her mother. She moved to the United States after high school where she earned various degrees and served as a clinical social worker. Drawn into advocating peace and nuclear non-proliferation, she founded One Sunny Day Initiatives in 2007 as part of efforts to serve as a bridge between Japanese and Americans, who fought a bitter war after Japan's surprise assault on Pearl Harbor in 1941, resulting in the world's first nuclear attack. "Americans carry wounds from Pearl Harbor, and Japanese carry wounds from everything, from the war...I wanted the Americans and the Japanese to get to know each other in such a way, not as a visitor from a foreign country, but a human being," said Tamura-Snider, who has also spoken at universities and events in the United States about her wartime experience. Collaborating with Green Legacy Hiroshima since 2017 to plant seeds of peace, she said her love for trees goes back to childhood, when her grandfather, who headed a multinational corporation, had a "huge, huge garden that was like a paradise in spring." To mark the 80th anniversary of the bombings on Hiroshima and Nagasaki this year, Green Legacy Hiroshima spearheaded a planting of two saplings from Hiroshima at the U.N. headquarters in New York in May, with plans to also conduct a similar planting at the former Japanese internment camp in Manzanar in California in September. "Until recently, most of Hiroshima's efforts have been verbal or human-centered, and I think it's very nice to bring a new dimension," said Azimi. Drawing renewed attention to the surviving greenery, the Hiroshima city government has launched a new project this year to use pruned branches of atomic-bombed trees to make products that convey peace, accepting proposals from interested individuals and organizations. Beyond caring for atomic-bombed trees in Hiroshima and educating visitors to the city through tours, Horiguchi has traveled across the world, including the U.N. office at Geneva, to advocate for peace through their enduring legacy. "Every country has its own unique relationship between trees and people, but I get the sense that there's always some emotional closeness. I believe that connection is universal," said Horiguchi. "I hope people can feel, through trees, that peace is important, and that nuclear weapons are wrong." © KYODO
The Mainichi
14 hours ago
- The Mainichi
Squid shortage halts Hokkaido auction for 1st time as season opens
HAKODATE, Hokkaido -- The fishing season for Japanese flying squid in southern Hokkaido opened on June 1, but the first auction scheduled for early in the morning the next day was not held since there was virtually no catch. According to the Hakodate fish market, this is the first time ever that the auction was canceled due to the lack of a catch in the first squid fishing of the season. Eleven small squid fishing boats departed from Hakodate fishing port on June 1, but there were almost no catches. The Hakodate Fisheries Research Institute of the Hokkaido Research Organization surveyed the distribution density of Japanese flying squid from around the Tsugaru Strait area to the Sea of Japan off the coast of Akita Prefecture between May 20 and 25. The distribution was about the same as last year but remained well below the average of the past five years, and a poor catch was expected at the beginning of this fishing season. (Japanese original by Kunihiko Misawa, Hakodate Bureau)
The Mainichi
2 days ago
- The Mainichi
Edging Toward Japan: The Japanese discovery of the colour blue
I seem to recall some years ago reading a short story by Haruki Murakami calling "Losing Blue" ("Ao ga Kieru"). If memory serves, this describes a man waking up one morning to discover, to his sadness, that the colour blue has completely vanished from the world, though nobody else apart from him appears to have noticed. The story seemed to me like quite a clever allegory for so many things that slip away from us in the modern world without anyone apparently realising. However, it's not so much losing the colour blue, but discovering it in the first place that has been on my mind recently. In July last year I was at an exhibition at the auction house Sotheby's in London and got to admire up close some original prints by Hokusai and Hiroshige. We are so used to images of Hokusai's famous depiction of "The Great Wave" or his blue-infused vision of Mount Fuji that we tend to think of the "blueyness" of this art as quintessentially Japanese. Yet a particular set of historical circumstances, and international influences, helped to produce this iconic art. A clampdown by the Japanese government on the depictions of the lusty pleasure quarters so beloved by ukiyo-e artists of the 18th century like Harunobu and Utamaro forced 19th century artists like Hokusai and Hiroshige to devote their attention to landscape portraiture instead. And crucially, they were suddenly given access to a vibrantly new colour pigment, Prussian Blue, produced in the factories of Northern Europe -- a world until then entirely closed to them. The combination of Japanese artists having their eyes turned towards previously ignored subjects and having a newly imported colour in which to paint them helped produce such iconic, visually arresting artworks. But then, the story of Japan's interaction with the colour blue has always been a rather peculiar one. One of the first things any student of elementary Japanese learns is that the word for "blue" in Japanese is "ao," but that this word actually means "blue or green." I must confess that, for long decades, I did not understand this. How could a word mean both blue and green? This seemed to me equivalent to having a word that meant "square or circular" i.e. very confusing about the meaning it is trying to convey. What makes this even more baffling is that the Japanese language also has a perfectly clear and common word for "green" ("midori"). So why on Earth would you not just have a word for "blue" ("ao") without bringing in the possibility that what you are talking about is not blue at all, but green? In terms of everyday usage, "ao" does indeed mean for most of the time "blue," but just when you think you can ignore the confusing "...or green" part of its meaning, it turns out that "green" things, which could be called "midori," are also called "ao." The most common example of this is the green of a traffic light, which is "ao," not "midori." As if all this isn't confusing enough, the expression for "deep green," the type of green you see when walking through summer woods for example, is "ao ao shita midori," which literally means "blue blue green." Why can't Japan keep "blue" and "green" apart? To answer that question, you have to think about the way we conceptualize colour in the world. We tend to think it natural to clearly differentiate the colours in a light spectrum as red, orange, yellow, green, blue, indigo, violet etc. But there is no particular reason why a specific band of the light spectrum is intrinsically obvious to us a definitive colour. Both wider and narrower bands of colour on the light spectrum might appear to us as recognizable colours depending on our associations with them. Most colours are obvious to us by connection with objects in the real world: blood is red; the sun is yellow. Indeed, many colours in Japanese are denoted by connection to real world objects. Grey is "rat-coloured" (nezumi-iro) or "ash-coloured" (hai-iro), while brown is "tea-coloured" (cha-iro). The problem with blue is that there are not many solid objects in the world that we can actually associate with blue. The two things people immediately think when you mention "blue" are the sky and the sea, but both of these are things you cannot grasp and whose colour are often a will-o-the-wisp of illusion. Pour some of that "blue" sea into a glass and it suddenly turns out to be colourless. The sky meanwhile is just empty air. With no solid object of fixed colour against which to correlate, "blue" has historically had the capacity to range loosely over the colour spectrum. In the case of Japan, "ao" denoted a range of blue and green, and retained that meaning even after the introduction of the word "midori" for green in the Heian Period. Japan is by no means unique in its often confusing approach to the colour "blue." In his book, "The World According to Colour", the art historian James Fox remarks how when European nations came into first contact with many ancient cultures -- from Pacific Islanders to the bushmen of southern Africa -- during the 19th century, they were baffled by the fact that so many of them seemed to have difficulty discerning exactly what "blue" was. Theories even abounded that they might even be colour blind to "blue." It's now more generally accepted that the decisive factor is linguistic and nearly all civilizations define "blue" at a later stage than other colours such as red, white and green. As the Victorian Prime Minister William Gladstone observed, Homer frequently refers to the "wine-dark sea" and yet never once calls either the sea or the sky "blue." Is this because Homer was -- as tradition has it -- blind or is it because there was simply no precise concept of "blue" amongst the Greeks of his time? We live in a world in which we often pessimistically contemplate, like Haruki Murakami's protagonist, how dangerously close we are to losing precious things from the world. But we sometimes forget just how recently even something as blindingly obvious as the colour blue fully entered our field of vision. When you look again at those intensely redolent blues of Hokusai's and Hiroshige's prints -- of Great Waves of Blue surging over you or a Mount Fuji of Blue soaring in your imagination -- you gain some sense of what it must have felt like to have the scales taken from your eyes and a primary colour to be transmitted to your senses in overwhelming Technicolor magnificence for the first time. There is seeing and then there is seeing. And there is always the potential of waking up one morning and perceiving the hues and texture of the world in a thrilling new way. @DamianFlanagan (This is Part 60 of a series) In this column, Damian Flanagan, a researcher in Japanese literature, ponders about Japanese culture as he travels back and forth between Japan and Britain. Profile: Damian Flanagan is an author and critic born in Britain in 1969. He studied in Tokyo and Kyoto between 1989 and 1990 while a student at Cambridge University. He was engaged in research activities at Kobe University from 1993 through 1999. After taking the master's and doctoral courses in Japanese literature, he earned a Ph.D. in 2000. He is now based in both Nishinomiya, Hyogo Prefecture, and Manchester. He is the author of "Natsume Soseki: Superstar of World Literature" (Sekai Bungaku no superstar Natsume Soseki).
