Toyosato, Shiga

Where it sits. Toyosato is a small town in Inukami District, eastern Shiga, on the flat alluvial plain between Lake Biwa and the Suzuka mountains. It has a population of around seven thousand, occupies barely eight square kilometres, and is one of the least-visited municipalities in a prefecture whose tourism is dominated by Hikone Castle and the lake shore ten minutes away. The old Nakasendō highway ran through this district, and the town is still laid out around it: rice fields, a scatter of hamlets, farm supply shops, and a single-track railway. Nothing about the setting explains why people travel here from Taipei, Seoul and Los Angeles.

The building. They come for a school. The old main buildings of Toyosato Elementary School were completed in 1937 and paid for personally by Furukawa Tetsujirō, a native of the town who had risen to senior management in the Marubeni trading house and endowed his birthplace with a school far beyond what a village of that size could have afforded. He commissioned William Merrell Vories, the American missionary-architect based at Ōmi-Hachiman who designed several hundred buildings across Japan. The result is a long, white, reinforced-concrete range with a shallow-arched entrance, generous windows and a restrained Western vocabulary — at the time it was described as the finest primary school in the East, and standing in the corridor today the claim is not absurd. The famous detail is the main staircase: on the newel posts of successive flights are bronze figures of a hare and a tortoise, positioned so that as you climb, the tortoise gains, and at the top it has won.

The fight to keep it. By 2001 the buildings were sixty-four years old and the town's mayor moved to demolish them and build a new school. What followed was one of the more remarkable preservation battles in provincial Japan: alumni, residents, architects and Vories specialists organised against the demolition, the dispute went to litigation and to the ballot box, and construction was physically obstructed. The mayor was ultimately recalled. The old buildings were saved, restored, and reopened in 2009 in a new role — the town library, offices for community organisations, meeting rooms and a café now occupy the classrooms, while a new school was built alongside. Entry is free and the corridors are open to the public during ordinary opening hours, which is unusual for a building of this quality.

On screen. In 2009 Kyoto Animation adapted K-On!, a manga about four girls in a school light music club, and modelled their Sakuragaoka High School closely on this building — the entrance, the corridors, the staircase with its hare and tortoise, and above all a corner room on the upper floor that became the club room where most of the series takes place. Fans arrived, and the town let them in. The room was furnished as the club room: tables, a tea set, instruments donated by visitors, a blackboard, and stacks of notebooks that visitors have filled with messages continuously for well over a decade. The volume of handwriting accumulated there is the real exhibit. Toyosato has hosted an annual fan gathering built around the anniversary of the series, and the town's tourist information carries the collaboration openly. As at Washinomiya in Saitama, the town's decision to cooperate rather than to shoo people away is the reason the phenomenon has lasted rather than burned out.

What else is here. The Furukawa connection produced other Vories work in the district, and the school grounds hold the Furukawa memorial hall. Toyosato is also the home of the Toyosato brewery district's sake and of a modest but real Nakasendō heritage — the neighbouring post town of Takamiya, one stop up the line, retains its highway streetscape and a very large shimenawa rope at its shrine. Hikone, with its original seventeenth-century castle keep and the Genkyū-en garden, is fifteen minutes north.

Getting there and timing. Toyosatō Station on the Ohmi Railway Main Line is about a ten-minute walk from the school; the line runs from Maibara through Hikone to Yōkaichi and Ōmi-Hachiman, at roughly two trains an hour, and it is a slow, single-track, one-carriage affair that is part of the experience. From Kyoto, take the JR line to Hikone and change. The buildings are generally open daily with limited closures — the café and library keep their own hours — and there is no admission charge. Spring brings cherry blossom along the approach; autumn is dry and clear with the Suzuka ridge visible behind the town; winter here is grey and can bring lake-effect snow.