Towada Education Plaza (十和田市教育プラザ)

Towada's municipal library goes back to 1909, when the village that preceded the city of Towada opened a library in its primary school to commemorate the tour of the Tōhoku region by the crown prince, the future Emperor Taishō. It started with 300 volumes.

The present library, designed by Tadao Ando, stands within the Education Plaza. It opened there in January 2015, at the end of a first phase of works; a second phase followed. It is 1.8 times the size of the old library.

The building is single-storey, in reinforced concrete. It brings together three areas: the library, the multipurpose training rooms and the education training centre.

In the library area, the shelves form a long band along the street of government offices (官庁街通り); large windows onto the outside let readers read while watching the landscapes of the four seasons. The plan includes a newspaper and magazine corner, an audiovisual and internet corner, a children's corner with its storytelling room, a general-books corner and a study corner. The two multipurpose training rooms, whose movable partitions adapt to many uses, serve library activities, training sessions and meetings; the education training centre hosts educational counselling.

The plan is dotted with five sunrooms, glazed rooms with no fixed use. The city presents them as places “full of light through the four seasons, where people relax and talk”, where a “book that is not a book” gathers, meaning lively communication through dialogue.

The library is used by all ages, from children to older people. In the sunrooms, people watch the view, read and think. In the storytelling room, children and adults alike take off their shoes and sit on the carpet to lose themselves in picture books. The library also holds read-aloud sessions of picture books and kamishibai (card-based storytelling).

The library is open from 9:00 to 20:00. It is closed on the fourth Thursday of each month and from 29 December to 4 January; exceptional closures occur, notably for the stocktake of the collections.