Yokohama Specie Bank Tokyo Branch (1922)
[What the drawings of reinforcement work after the Great Kanto Earthquake tell us]

In 1914 (Taisho 3), Tokyo Station opened, and Marunouchi experienced a construction boom, aided by the economic boom caused by World War I. The Yokohama Specie Bank Tokyo branch was completed in 1922 (Taisho 11) on the corner of Eitai-dori and Naka-dori, where the Marunouchi Eiraku Building is now located.

It was designed by Kotaro Sakurai and was built at the same time as Mitsubishi Bank's head office. At the time, bank architecture, like Mitsubishi Bank, tended to have classical facade to show credibility and status, but this building has a simple Secession-style design. The interior has an open ceiling in the middle, and light pours in from the glass ceiling into the business office on the first floor. The customer space in the business office is lined with reinforced concrete "round columns."

The design drawings for this building that remain include the "New Construction Drawings" that were drawn up by Akira Fujimura under Sakurai, and the "Reinforcement Construction Drawings" that were drawn up by Ryoichi Kawamoto under Fujimura after Sakurai left the company. What on earth was this "reinforcement construction"? In April of the year of completion, a strong earthquake struck the Tokyo area. It is known that the Maru Building, which was under construction at the time, had its brick exterior walls and hollow block partitions collapsed, leaving it in a devastating state, and looking at the drawings, the walls of this bank were constructed in a similar way. It was likely that it could not have escaped the damage. To add insult to injury, the Great Kanto Earthquake struck in September of the year after completion. The reinforcement construction drawings were drawn up just two months after the earthquake, and the surviving drawings clearly show the thinking behind the earthquake-resistance renovation work that was carried out immediately after the earthquake.

For the reinforcement work, the brick exterior walls and hollow block partition walls were removed, the surfaces of the RC columns were chipped away, and the columns and walls were joined together with RC. The round columns of the first floor business office seen earlier were changed to thicker "square columns," perhaps because they had sustained significant damage or because they looked daunting. Looking more closely, we can see that an "arch" was added between the columns in the visitor's space of the first floor business office, which had been changed to square columns, something that was not on the new construction plans. Changing the space from a round column to a continuous arched space made up of a series of square columns was likely the solution to the request to increase strength while maintaining the dignity of a bank.