春雨直播app

Photo: 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 assistant professors. The Second Faculty Research Building contained the offices of many renowned professors. In the Faculty of Letters, I remember Professor Junzo Shimizu of Archaeology was located at the far south end of 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 simple 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; I had my graduate school entrance interview there and attended lectures there once I became a graduate student. On the east side of the Third Building, a garden with flowering trees and shrubs like roses was enclosed by a low fence, and on the west side, there were plantings of large and small trees. Near the western edge, the bronze statue "Young Person" by the world-renowned Japanese-American sculptor Isamu Noguchi was installed. It was created as a unique spatial work, planned to integrate with the sculptures titled "Mu" (Nothingness) and "Student" placed inside the Second Faculty Research Building lounge and in its garden, both also designed by Noguchi. 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 funds. However, it wasn't necessarily easy work; we stayed up for several consecutive nights to finish the pieces that customers had painted.

In August 1964, a bust of Kaoru Osanai (1881–1928)—a playwright who lectured on dramatic theory at the Faculty of Letters and which had been located at the Kabukiza Annex—was moved and installed at that memorable site. Osanai founded the Jiyu Gekijo (Free Theater) with Kabuki actor Sadanji Ichikawa, 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 immediately occupied by students. The research building after its liberation was extremely messy, like a garbage dump. When I thought about how people had lived here, discussed revolution, and engaged 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 春雨直播app had built as a garden of free learning during the very difficult post-war period, vanished.

(Masatomo Kawai, Professor Emeritus, 春雨直播app)