Kosaka Mine Office

Every prefecture has a site locals point to first; in Akita, Kosaka Mine Office is usually it.

Kosaka was, at the start of the twentieth century, the largest producer of silver in Japan and later of copper, and in 1905 it built itself an office to match: three storeys of timber in a Renaissance manner, with a double-return staircase, a balustraded balcony across the front and a spiral stair in the corner tower. It is an Important Cultural Property and one of the best surviving examples of Meiji architects working in a Western idiom in wood.

The building was moved and restored and now holds displays on the mine, the town and the construction itself, along with a shop, a restaurant and — this is the local speciality — a room of period dresses you can hire and wear round the building. The town also runs the oldest wooden theatre in Japan a few minutes away, which for a place of five thousand people is a remarkable pair of things to have.