Toda Boathouse

April 28, 2022

Image: The 6th Boathouse (Inauguration ceremony in 1973)

The Keio University Athletic Association Rowing Club was founded in 1889, making this its 133rd year. During this time, it has competed in numerous Olympics and won many All-Japan Championships, and this success has been supported by the "boathouse" and "training camp." Currently, the boathouse stores dozens of racing shells, including imported eights costing 10 million yen. The first Juku boathouse was the Shibaura Boathouse, built in 1898, and the second and third boathouses were built on the Sumida River, which was the mecca of rowing at the time. In 1940, following the relocation of the Preparatory Course to Hiyoshi, the fourth boathouse, the Tamagawa Boathouse, was built through the Tamagawa River embankment but was destroyed by air raids in 1944. Meanwhile, when the Toda Boat Course was completed in 1940 as the world's first artificial rowing course for the "1940 Tokyo Olympics," the Juku acquired 720 tsubo of land at the Toda course in the same year.

After the Tamagawa Boathouse was destroyed, the club operated on the Sumida River using boats and oars borrowed from other universities, but plans were made to build a boathouse in Toda. In 1949, the elegant fifth-generation training camp and boathouse, a two-story wooden structure, were completed. It was the work of Yoshiro Taniguchi, who also designed the Togu Imperial Palace and the Keio Yochisha Elementary School Main Building.

Rowing is the ultimate team sport, and to foster perfect uniformity, it is essential to have an attached training camp for long-term stays. While this fifth boathouse and training camp built the golden age of the Juku Rowing Club, the boat storage capacity was only about 10 boats, and the training camp had the space of a single-family house, accommodating about 20 people. It was a dense living environment with no air conditioning, showers, or storage, where each person lived in a space of just one tatami mat. Due to deterioration—drafts coming through the windows of the wooden building, snow piling up on futons on winter mornings, and mushrooms growing on the tatami mats during the rainy season—the sixth-generation boathouse, a two-story reinforced concrete structure, was completed in 1973.

However, this boathouse also had structural issues for athlete conditioning, with temperatures reaching 40°C in midsummer. In 1989, marking the "Centenary of the Rowing Club," a new boathouse construction project was planned as a commemorative project and a fundraising campaign was conducted. After taking sufficient time to design it with boat storage capacity and the comfort of camp life as top priorities, the seventh-generation boathouse, a well-equipped structure designed to last over 50 years, was completed in 1993. The current boathouse is a steel-frame structure with the boathouse on the first floor and the training camp space on the second floor. It has three times the boat storage capacity of previous facilities, and the training camp can accommodate over 80 people. It is fully air-conditioned and equipped with an indoor training room, large bunk beds, a spacious self-catering kitchen, and a large communal bath with hot showers.

A truly luxurious and comfortable boathouse compared to previous ones was completed, and the club members use it with great care. Nearly 30 years have passed since its completion, but I am confident that it will be used for another 50 years, and that in this Toda Boathouse, completed through the donations and cooperation of the Juku and its alumni, the members will firmly embody the "source of honorable character" and become "a paragon of intellect and morals for the entire nation," growing into fine individuals who contribute to society.

(Eisuke Hiraoka, President of Mita Rowing Club)