The Third Faculty Research Building

2020/11/30

Image: The Third Faculty Research Building and the statue of Kaoru Osanai (late 1970s). The Osanai statue was moved to the east side of the Old University Library in 1984.

In the early 1960s, there were three faculty research buildings on the Mita Hilltop Square: the First, Second, and Third. The First Faculty Research Building housed associate professors, full-time lecturers, and assistants. The Second Faculty Research Building contained the rooms of many famous professors. In the Faculty of Letters, I remember Professor Junzo Shimizu of Archaeology was in the back of the south side on the second floor. It was there that I saw the National Treasure "Jar with Autumn Grass Design" owned by the Juku. The jar was kept in a crude iron locker, and I later heard it was deposited at the Tokyo National Museum to ensure its preservation.

The Third Faculty Research Building seemed to house many professors from the Faculty of Letters, and I had my graduate school entrance interview and attended lectures there once I became a graduate student. On the east side of the Third Building, there was a garden with roses and other flowering trees surrounded by a low fence, and on the west side, there were plantings of trees large and small. Near the western edge, the bronze statue "Young Person" by the world-renowned Japanese-American sculptor Isamu Noguchi was placed. It was created as a unique spatial composition by the artist, designed to integrate with the interior of the Second Faculty Research Building lounge (also designed by Noguchi) and the sculptures titled "Mu" (Nothingness) and "Student" placed in the garden. On the north side of these plantings, there was an area without trees, and during the Mita Festival, the club I belonged to opened a raku-ware pottery shop to earn some serious money. However, it wasn't necessarily easy work; it took several consecutive all-nighters to finish the pieces that people had painted.

In August 1964, the bust of Kaoru Osanai (1881–1928)—a playwright who lectured on dramatic theory at the Faculty of Letters of the Juku—was moved from the Kabuki-za Annex and installed in that memorable spot. Osanai founded the Jiyu Gekijo (Free Theater) with Kabuki actor Ichikawa Sadanji, and the Tsukiji Shogekijo (Tsukiji Little Theater) with Yoshi Hijikata. He is the man who laid the foundations of modern Japanese theater.

Currently, the faculty research building located in the north of the campus stands on the former site of the First Faculty Research Building and the Third School Building. I was hired as an assistant in the Faculty of Letters in 1969 and given a room on the second floor, but it was a period of intense student activism, and it was soon occupied by students. After it was liberated, the research building was as messy as a trash heap. When I thought about how people had lived there, discussing revolution and engaging in promiscuity, I felt sad, as if I could see how it would all end.

When the New Faculty Research Building was built, the Graduate School Building took the place of the Third Building. Then, when the Second Building—highly regarded as a masterpiece of Yoshiro Taniguchi's post-war modernist architecture—was demolished and the South Mansion was newly built, all of the innovative historical school buildings and research offices on the Mita Hilltop Square, which had been built as a garden of free learning during the extremely difficult post-war period of the Juku, disappeared.

(Masatomo Kawai, Professor Emeritus, Keio University)