The record
The only wall element with a door known outside Germany — bought with its keys by a firm that builds façade cradles, for a museum of exterior walls that was never built.
Segment B008, a piece of the Berlin Wall from the Brandenburg Gate, was offered for sale by Limex in 1990. A board member of Nihon Bisoh, a Tokyo firm that maintains building façades, bought it; the present owners could not say what was paid. It arrived in Japan in the summer of 1990 with a certificate of authenticity, two bronze Limex seals, and the keys to the door.
The plan was to make it the foundation stone of a museum of exterior walls. The board saw a moral obligation in it: a company that makes the cradles suspended down the sides of buildings ought also to engage with what walls mean. The museum was never built. The segment went instead to the company's factory at Togitsu in Nagasaki Prefecture, where it is explained to employees and visitors on the works tour; the door and its two keys are shown as a rarity, which is exactly what they are.
Why a wall would have a door in it is the better part of the story. From the middle of the 1970s the GDR leadership had the border rebuilt with the L-shaped concrete elements now recognised everywhere, the Grenzmauer 75. Three years in, the border troops found they had made a mistake: in the inner city the elements had been set back from the actual boundary, leaving a narrow strip of GDR territory on the western side. The new wall could not be climbed from the west — and could not be crossed from the east either, so the guards could no longer reach their own ground. The commander of the Berlin-Mitte border command raised it. In the autumn of 1978 it was decided to fit doors, partly against surprises from the western side and above all so that the graffiti being painted on the west face could be scrubbed off.
The position of this record is withheld: the imported coordinates put it near Osaka, 557 kilometres from Togitsu, and the catalogue's other Togitsu record carries the right one.
How did it get here?
Segment B008, from the Brandenburg Gate, bought from Limex in 1990 by a board member of Nihon Bisoh, and delivered with a certificate of authenticity, two bronze Limex seals and the door keys.
Sources
Listed by the Federal Foundation as #251 and by the Berlin Wall Archive as #426.
Federal Foundation — Berlin Wall worldwide, site entry ↗
Segment B008 as the only known wall element with a door outside Germany, its purchase from Limex by a Nihon Bisoh board member, the certificate, seals and keys, the unbuilt museum of exterior walls and the board's stated reasoning, its present place at the Togitsu factory, and the history of the Grenzmauer 75 and the 1978 decision to fit doors so that the border troops could reach the forward strip and remove graffiti.
Inventory listingSource accessed 2026-09-17
Federal Foundation — Berlin Wall worldwide ↗
The source lists this place as a Berlin Wall location. Coordinates, where supplied, are source-reported and may represent a general area. This is not independent verification of authenticity, current presence, or public access.
Inventory listingSource accessed 2026-09-17 · Source record 251
Berlin Wall Archive ↗
The source lists this place as a Berlin Wall location. Coordinates, where supplied, are source-reported and may represent a general area. This is not independent verification of authenticity, current presence, or public access.
Inventory listingSource accessed 2026-09-17 · Source record 426
Source-reported segments: 1. This is not a separately verified count.
No photograph of this one has been published. If you have taken one, or know when it arrived or who gave it, we would like to hear. Contribute to this record