Osaka International Junior and Senior High School has built an entire school around a striking concept: the school building itself functions as a library.
Light pours through a skylight into the central atrium. Classrooms line the “port” and “starboard” sides of the four-story building, which staff liken to a ship. Bookshelves run along the corridors and walls, so that students walking the halls move through what looks like a sea of books.
The school, located in Moriguchi City, traces its origins to Teikoku Girls’ High School, founded in 1929. The current institution was formed in April 2022 through the merger of Osaka International Takii High School and Osaka International Owada Junior and Senior High School, becoming a co-educational school under the motto “Refine Your Character.” The new building, with its library-centered design, opened that same year.
Vice Principal Takashi Yoshimoto, 69, said the idea is to make books part of everyday surroundings. Library-based education, he explained, forms the foundation for nurturing independent learning and thinking skills.
Shelved by Theme, Not by Category
The school’s roughly 20,000 volumes, including foreign-language titles, are not organized by the standard Nippon Decimal Classification system, with categories such as “philosophy” or “history.” Instead, the collection is arranged around five original themes chosen by the school.
Kakui Takano, 37, a teacher-librarian, illustrated the approach with a book about Mother Teresa shelved on the first floor under the theme “Taking Flight into the World.” The book would typically be filed under “social welfare” or “Christianity,” Takano said, but the school placed it instead in the section on India, so that students first encounter her as someone who worked there, and let their curiosity expand from that starting point.
The result is that books which would never sit side by side in a conventional library end up next to one another. As students browse the shelves or search for something to read, an unexpected title catches their eye, and they pick it up. That kind of chance encounter with books is exactly what the school is aiming for.
Built for Casual Browsing
Seven staff members, including Takano and librarians dispatched from Kinokuniya Bookstore, handle lending and inquiries at a first-floor counter. Two “Book of the Month” corners rotate themes to introduce new titles, and a notebook at the counter lets students freely jot down their impressions.
One standout program, now in its fourth year, is the “Book Obi Project,” in which first-year high school students spend their summer break designing an obi, the promotional band wrapped around a book’s cover, to introduce a title borrowed from the school library.
Hallway bookshelves at Osaka International Junior and Senior High School allow students to read while waiting between activities. Moriguchi, Osaka Prefecture (©Sankei/Kotaro Hikono).
The finished designs go on display at the school festival, and a selection is placed on real shelves at Kinokuniya’s flagship Umeda store, a detail that keeps student motivation high.
“On a busy day we’ll lend out close to 100 books,” Takano said. “The original goal was really to encourage casual browsing, so a lot of what happens doesn’t show up in the numbers. But there’s almost no student here who goes a full year without picking up a single book.”
Hasuha Yoshimura, a second-year student who says she has read 126 books so far this year, described the pull of the shelves. “I love looking over the school’s bookshelves. I keep finding different books and realizing there’s a whole world I didn’t know about. It makes me happy—it feels like my own world is expanding,” she said.
A Quieter Kind of Teaching
Takano’s own pick reflects a similar philosophy. The book centers on the theme of putting thoughts into words, and argues that filler sounds people make before speaking, such as “uh” or “um,” serve real functions rather than getting in the way.
Organizing one’s thoughts clearly does make life easier, Takano said, but she pushed back against the idea that silence, filler words, or an inability to articulate something is a failure. Those moments, she said, are part of what makes a person feel human.
She added that a person’s true character often shows up in the cluttered, disorganized places, and that a society preoccupied with tidiness tends to undervalue the acts of listening and imagining. As both a teacher-librarian and in her own life, she said, that is something she doesn’t want to lose sight of.
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Author: The Sankei Shimbun
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