Experts Urge Japan-Style Artisans to Tackle Historic Building Restoration Crisis

During its half-century under Japanese rule, Taiwan accumulated a vast and diverse architectural heritage, ranging from official government offices, schools, and railway stations to Japanese-style dormitories inhabited by ordinary citizens. These historic buildings bear witness to the trajectory of Taiwan's modernization and have become an indispensable cultural fabric within the contemporary urban landscape. However, as these buildings age, weather over time, and suffer from natural disasters, the proper restoration and preservation of these precious cultural assets have become a crucial issue in Taiwan's cultural conservation efforts in recent years. Addressing this arduous task, professional restoration experts from Japan recently pointed out that Taiwan is currently facing a severe generational gap in talent within the field of Japanese colonial-era architectural restoration. This issue not only affects the quality of restoration for individual buildings but also poses hidden concerns for the overall sustainable development of cultural assets.

Ishiura Yuji, Secretary-General of the Kanazawa Craftsmanship College in Japan, publicly noted in Tainan City recently that a clear phenomenon of talent scarcity does indeed exist in Taiwan during the process of restoring Japanese colonial-era buildings. As a stronghold of traditional Japanese craftsmanship and artisan culture, Kanazawa has long been dedicated to cultivating restoration professionals equipped with superior techniques and profound expertise. Ishiura analyzed that most architecture from the Japanese colonial period integrates traditional Japanese wooden construction methods, Western-style brick and stone masonry, and even special hybrid construction techniques characteristic of that transitional era. The structural designs and detailed decorations of these buildings cannot be easily mastered by ordinary modern construction workers or traditional Chinese-style building artisans. Faced with these unique historic structures, without orthodox, rigorous, and systematic artisan training, restoration projects often tend to remain superficial or may even cause irreversible secondary damage to the historic sites during the construction process.

To effectively resolve the dilemma of the talent gap, Ishiura specially emphasized that Taiwan's restoration practitioners and related units must confront the importance of professional education and practical training, and may even find it necessary to study and advance their skills at artisan schools with well-established systems. Japanese artisan schools typically combine theory with hands-on practice, where experienced senior masters impart core techniques—such as traditional carpentry, tilework, lacquerware, and wall plastering—through personal instruction. This model, which combines the apprentice system with modern education, ensures the precision of restoration techniques. Only through such a solid learning process can Taiwanese restoration teams truly grasp the structural logic and aesthetic essence of Japanese-era architecture, thereby elevating the technical standards and professional depth of domestic Japanese-era building preservation as a whole.

The preservation and reuse of Japanese-era architecture in Taiwan have risen in recent years from mere "old house revitalization" to the heights of "historical memory and urban identity." From the Presidential Office Building and Taipei Guest House in Taipei to the numerous Japanese-style dormitory clusters and the Governor's Official Residence in Tainan City, these buildings are not merely spatial entities, but cultural bridges connecting the past and the present. However, precisely because these structures are of advanced age and feature special construction methods, restoration work often consumes a massive amount of time, funding, and highly specialized techniques. Without sufficient restoration talent, many precious cultural assets may face the crisis of disrepair and collapse because suitable craftsmen cannot be found, or they may lose their original historical value due to improper restoration techniques—which is undoubtedly a major warning sign for Taiwan's cultural asset preservation work.

From a long-term development perspective, Ishiura's advice highlights a major blind spot in Taiwan's sustainable management of cultural assets. In the past, historic site restoration in Taiwan has largely relied too heavily on bidding systems and short-term engineering outsourcing, often overlooking the truly crucial element behind the scenes: the "people," namely artisans equipped with traditional craftsmanship techniques. To break the current deadlock of the talent gap, apart from drawing on the artisan training experiences of places like Kanazawa in Japan, Taiwan should also actively establish a domestic artisan certification and training system, encouraging the younger generation to commit to this seemingly monotonous yet deeply meaningful path of restoration. Only when the pool of professional talent is gradually replenished can Taiwan's Japanese-era architecture—and its broader historical assets—extend their vitality through the process of restoring old things to their original state, becoming cultural treasures passed down from generation to generation.