The other day after a whirlwind weekend of sakura planting, reenacting and touring the greater Maizuru area I decided that before starting the long trip back to Sasebo I needed to take a break. Get some country air and have a leisurely day appreciating old architecture so I got on a local line for Toyosato, Shiga Prefecture, and the former Toyosato Elementary School, which was constructed in 1937 and stands as an interesting specimen of educational architecture from that time.

Or, for the rest of the audience: I traveled to the middle of nowhere to see the real life school from the anime K-On!! (But, I really did go for the architecture.)

For those who also just came for the architecture and are unaware, K-On!! is an anime about a high school light music club that does a lot of nothing. It’s the reason the entire ‘cute girls doing cute things’ genre exists. It was made by Kyoto Animation, which is a studio I appreciate for their obsessive attention to detail in the creation of backgrounds and ambience in their shows.

If a property they acquire has a real world location attached, like Haruhi Suzumiya’s unnamed Osaka suburb (Nishinomiya) but was the author’s real home town, they painstakingly recreate it. For something like K-On!! which had no real world equivalent they find one and just as painstakingly recreate it, even though this is entirely unnecessary. Somehow they found this school in a town of 7500 way off the beaten track.

The school was built in 1937 with donations from a local merchant and Toyosato graduate, Tetsujiro Furukawa. He sank 600,000 yen, two-thirds of his personal fortune, into funding a modern steel-reinforced ferroconcrete school for his hometown. William Merrell Vories was hired to do the job. Vories had an interesting background himself, being a former American turned naturalized Japanese citizen who came to the country as a teacher and now made a living as an architect to support his evangelical work. A respectable professional, his architecture can be seen around the Kansai area and includes homes, schools, churches, department stores, a post office and even a sanitarium.

The result is a school that ably served the community for more than six decades. The city considered tearing it down after it was decommissioned but public outcry saved it. Instead it was renovated, and parts converted to the city public library, a day care center and the tourism office. The large auditorium is still rented out and on the day I came was unavailable to visit because the current elementary school was using it for music practice and loudly singing and dancing to anime songs.

With the renovation less than a decade old the old school is still vibrant and grime-free and its grounds are well-kept. Walking up to the main entrance I noticed the bust of Furukawa off to the side. It made me smile because I knew that before leaving I’d get a shot of my well-traveled hat on its head.

I arrived around 9:30 a.m. and there was no one around beside an elderly man who just smiled at me as I walked in. I’d read online that it could get rather busy and I hate people in my shots so I made seeing the K-On!! club room while it was empty my first priority.

I’d never seen a map for the school and didn’t actually know where the club room was, but I saw a brass tortoise and hare (“usakame”) at the bottom of the central stairwell and let intuition take over. I de-shoed at the entrance and had to wear those awkward Japanese slippers that never stay on, but managed to quickly race up three flights of stairs worn smooth as glass to the top with its victorious tortoise and what I assumed was the entrance to the school’s most famous room.

I peeked in the door’s window. Tea and cake had been set at the desk that had been pushed together near the back of the room and an old cassette deck sat alone on a bench. I wasn’t sure if I could go in because the door was closed, but it was unlocked. So I gingerly took hold of the rickety brass door knob (I was honestly afraid of handling the door knobs in this building because I didn’t want one falling off in my hand) and let myself in. I came for the architecture, but that didn’t mean I wasn’t looking forward to this as well.

For sixty years this may have been just a meeting room adjacent to the actual music room, but it’s the Sakuragaoka High School Light Music Club Room now. It is kept as a real life anime location, with all the props in place and little details here and there, though with fan concessions like the paraphernalia and the blackboard whose drawings and writing are updated daily. A pile of guest books and photo books to the side show the daily changes in the blackboard from years ago. It’s silly and a bit absurd that it exists, but maybe that’s why it was fun to visit.

For TV there were some changes, the room itself is a rectangle but the show squished it into an “L” with a short tail near the back wall. To achieve this, the blackboard was shortened and benches along the wall removed. The detail work on the glass of the school main entrance was also used in the show’s club room entrance, which in real life is plain. The closet with a rack of random costumes is really a connecting passageway to the back of the stage in the real music room next door. The door to the roof has also been deleted, making this the one time in anime history that a roof has been made inaccessible to students.

I liked that while redressed, the show did make use of items that appear to have always been in the room, like the bench and a positively ancient Yamaha organ.

Yui’s desk, I presume.

Easier to maintain than a real turtle tank.

After walking round, spotting amusing episode references like the yellow hard hat or the ‘Europe’ paper mask hidden in a desk, and getting pictures of it all, I left my otaku nerdiness in the club room to indulge my non-otaku nerdiness and love of old buildings. My wife has informed me that it is still being an otaku either way.

The layout of modern schools hasn’t changed since this one was built, but old places differ in the details. Everything is framed in beautiful, well-worn wood, the door handles are brass and Vories’ little flourishes in design, like the stairwell usakame are all around.

As mentioned earlier, there’s a music room with drums and organs up by the club room I could walk in and several empty second floor rooms have been maintained as what they were- science room, geography, etc. but only a plain homeroom was kept more or less as it was in 1937.

Seeing the room full of wooden desks got me thinking about another set of locations I’d been looking into lately, the Honkawa and Fukuro-machi Elementary Schools in Hiroshima. Like Toyosato they were new reinforced concrete buildings but they had withstood the atomic bombing of Hiroshima, despite being less than a half kilometer from the hypocenter. Looking at the rows of desks I wondered if they looked like Toyosato before the bomb. Seeing a cutesy anime girl club room and then pondering atomic bomb destruction in the same building, I travel weird.

I didn’t get to go in the auditorium because it was in use, so the last part of the school to visit was the Shutoku Memorial Hall, the current gift shop and former library/study hall. I loved this room because it was very Art Deco from the light fixtures to the balconies. A few anime fans were banging out drawings at one of the tables and a tobidashi dragon maid was propped up in the corner. The back room is an actual K-On!! shrine, complete with those little wooden shrine charms, probably made of all the stuff fans have left behind. Lots of merchandise, but also lots of fan art.

When visiting, I recommend stopping by the gift shop (building on the left when facing the main entrance) first because it has free Toyosato English-language maps, which show local points of interest and have a map of the school inside. It also has unique little K-On!! gifts with the town name on the back. I wouldn’t be surprised if they were made in the school’s wood and metal working shop.

  I’d also read that you’re supposed to sign in when visiting the building, but the practice has ceased and the doodle-filled log books are probably the ones now piled inside  the club room.

I saw most of the ‘preserved’ parts of the school, but apparently I missed a room dead center of the building on the first floor that has exhibits on the school’s history. I thought it was an office so left it alone. Most of the first floor is still used for various purposes.

Outside the school, Toyosato has embraced its anime notoriety and has incorporated it into the landscape. Tobidashi, wooden ‘child crossing’ warnings shaped like kids, mostly look like anime characters and light post banners bear the town’s name stylized in K-On!! font. I also noticed posters everywhere, bakeries, stationery shops, men’s suit stores, and sake breweries alike, for ‘birthday parties’ held on character birthdays that the former school has held every year since 2011. To me these things didn’t clash with the town’s atmosphere but adds a little quirkiness to it.

Azusa and Mugi are on hand to greet visitors the moment they step out of the train station.

Look, an alien! (This is on the far side of the school, you come across it if you overshoot and have to circle around the building.)

Also, if you want to visit and not have your experience ruined by a thousand anime fans or conversely, you want to attend one of the ‘birthday parties’ and not get left out because you didn’t pre-register, check out the Toyosato Teatime website. (Link below)

Before anime fame, Toyosato had its Edo heritage going for it to bring in visitors. Toyosato is on the Nakasendo, the central road from Kyoto to Edo. This was an extremely important artery for moving daimyos and their entourages between their domains and the capital and so well-off Ohmi merchants, such as the Furukawa family, who also plied this route came from Toyosato. Today there are two museums dedicated to this time period, the Ito Chubei and Yutaka museums, both of which are inside old merchant houses and display artifacts from the era. The schools itself is on the Nakasendo, so just exit the front gate, turn left and walk straight until you get to the museums. The lady working at the gift shop was kind enough to suggest the museums and show me where they were on the map. Since I’d come this far afield and would likely not get a chance to return I decided to make the most of the day here in town.

The school gates and this Yui are on the Nakasendo. This amuses me for some reason.

Unfortunately, it was Monday and both were closed. Undeterred, I made the even longer walk through town and field and across the river to reach the Okamura Honke sake brewery to sample the local flavor. There wasn’t much to the walk, and that was kind of nice. It was a blue sky day and the narrow streets and rows of very traditional looking houses gave it a pleasant atmosphere. The lunchtime loud speaker song is even “Moon River,” how much more laid back does it get than that?

Busiest intersection in town, which is on the Nakasendo

Toyosato Station

By the time I returned to the station platform with a few souvenirs from the school and brewery I’d had a pretty fulfilling day out in an interesting small town that was just plain relaxing.

Getting to Toyosato from Kyoto Station I recommend taking the JR special rapid service to Maibara and there switching to the Ohmi Line (non-JR local train) and riding it to Toyosato Station. To get home take the Ohmi Line to Hikone and then the JR special rapid service for Himeji.

Mission accomplished.

ADDRESS
Toyosato Elementary School
518 Ishibatake, Toyosato-cho, Inukami-gun, Shiga-ken 529-1169

Birthday Parties
http://toyosatoteatime.info/

(Run it through Google translate)

School information from the Toyosato tourism pamphlet and: www.toyosato-elschool.net