Watanabe Memorial Hall, Music hall in Asahimachi, Ube, Japan

Watanabe Memorial Hall is a music hall in Asahimachi, Ube, with a dark brown tiled facade and tall white piers. A band of vertical gray fins runs above the brickwork, and a flat concrete canopy shelters the entrance. Inside, the auditorium has grey-blue seats and a curving white ceiling with yellow scalloped valance panels above the stage.

The building was completed in 1937 and designed by architect Murano Togo to honor Watanabe Sukesaku, a coal mining businessman who developed Ube city. Its construction reflected the wealth and influence that this entrepreneur held in the region.

The terrace in front of the hall holds a rectangular memorial stone flanked by six memorial columns, three on each side, standing for the seven companies that funded the building. The bronze statue of Watanabe Yusaku in the adjoining park, sculpted by Asakura Fumio in 1936, was removed for metal during the war and recast in 1952. In 2007 the hall appeared as a Ginza cinema in the film ALWAYS: Sunset on Third Street 2.

The hall stands in Asahimachi, a three-minute walk from JR Ube Shinkawa Station on the Ube Line; the same station is served by Ube city buses. The terrace in front holds a rectangular monument flanked by six memorial columns, three on each side. The stage opening is 18 m wide (14 m between the main columns) and 12 m deep.

Murano called the hall "my breakthrough work", the first of many Ube projects he designed, including the Ube Kosan Building. Violinist Yehudi Menuhin's 1951 Japan tour chose it as a venue. In 2007 it stood in for a Ginza cinema in the film Always: Sunset on Third Street 2.