Edwin Dun Memorial Hall (former Hokkaido Government

Edwin Dun Memorial Hall: A Meiji-Era Office at the Roots of Hokkaido Dairying

On the southern edge of Sapporo, a pale wooden building sits quietly within a small public park, surrounded by tall trees and the sound of the Makomanai irrigation channel. Its weatherboard siding, hipped roof, and side verandas mark it as a survivor from the Meiji period: the former office of the Makomanai Livestock Breeding Station. Built in 1887 and now serving as the Edwin Dun Memorial Hall, the building was registered as a National Tangible Cultural Property on September 26, 2000.

The structure is single-story, finished in board siding, and roofed in painted sheet metal. It covers 231 square meters. A central gabled entrance projects forward from the main hipped roof, and a small dormer window sits above it — a modest piece of Western design imported into the cold edge of late-nineteenth-century Japan.

The American Who Helped Build Hokkaido's Dairy Industry

Edwin Dun was born in Chillicothe, Ohio in 1848, into a family that owned thousands of acres of farmland across Ross County and beyond. He was in his mid-twenties when, in 1873 (Meiji 6), he was hired by Japan's Hokkaido Colonization Commission (Kaitakushi) as one of the foreign experts brought in to modernize the country's northern frontier. He arrived in Japan with cattle and sheep, and after periods at the Azabu experimental farm in Tokyo and the Nanae station near Hakodate, was sent to Makomanai.

In 1876, Dun selected the site at Makomanai for what would become the Kaitakushi cattle ranch. He oversaw the introduction of dairy cattle, the breeding of pigs and horses, and the early production of butter, cheese, condensed milk, ham, and sausage. In 1879, to address chronic water shortages for the growing herds, he directed the excavation of an irrigation canal nearly four kilometers long that drew water from the Makomanai River. Sections of that canal still run through the neighborhood today.

Dun returned to the United States in 1883 when the Colonization Commission was dissolved. He came back to Japan the following year, however, in an entirely different role: as a diplomat. He served as second secretary at the U.S. Legation in Tokyo from 1884, eventually rising to Minister Plenipotentiary in 1893. He worked on peace negotiations during the First Sino-Japanese War, later moved into petroleum development in Niigata, and lived out his final years in Tokyo, where he died in 1931 at age 82.

A Building That Postdates Its Namesake

One of the quieter facts about this memorial hall is that the building itself was constructed in 1887 — four years after Edwin Dun had permanently returned to the United States as a private citizen. By that time the Kaitakushi had been abolished, and the Makomanai ranch had passed to the Ministry of Agriculture and Commerce, which renamed it the Makomanai Livestock Breeding Station. The new office was designed by the ministry's Hokkaido Affairs Administration Bureau.

Even so, the building is inseparable from Dun's legacy. For seventy years, from 1876 until it was requisitioned by occupying U.S. forces in 1946, the Makomanai station was the center from which dairy and livestock practices spread across Hokkaido. The office building stood at the heart of that work through most of those decades, through a series of renamings: Hokkaido Government Livestock Station (1893), Hokkaido Agricultural Experiment Station, Livestock Division (1936), and onward.

After the war, the breeding station was relocated inland to Shintoku, and the original office building lost its purpose. It was nearly demolished. In 1964 a group called the Edwin Dun Commemoration Society stepped in, moved a portion of the structure roughly 1.5 kilometers south to its present site in Makomanai Central Park (now Edwin Dun Memorial Park), and opened it as a museum.

Why It Was Designated

The Agency for Cultural Affairs registered the building under the criterion of being "a model of architectural design." It is one of a small group of early Western-style government buildings surviving in Hokkaido, alongside the Clock Tower in central Sapporo and several structures associated with the former Sapporo Agricultural College. What sets the Makomanai office apart is its specific identity as a working agricultural-administration building from a period when livestock farming itself was a new idea in Japan.

In 2007 the Ministry of Economy, Trade and Industry also certified the building as a Modernization Industrial Heritage site, grouping it with Sapporo Beer Museum and other properties that document the rise of Hokkaido's primary industries. The same year it received the 13th Sapporo Urban Landscape Award.

Inside the Memorial Hall

The interior is small enough to walk through in fifteen minutes if you keep moving, and large enough to fill an unhurried hour. The central exhibits are twenty-three oil paintings by Hokkaido-born painter Ichiki Masumi, completed over five years and based on Dun's own memoirs. They begin with the young Dun departing Ohio and end with his final years in Tokyo. Each painting is captioned in detail, giving the rooms something of the rhythm of an illustrated book.

The innermost room holds a scale model of the original Makomanai Livestock Breeding Station, which lets visitors see how the office sat within the wider compound of cattle barns, sheep folds, dairies, and feed fields. From this room you can also clearly see the verandas that wrap the rear of the building — a defining feature noted in the cultural property registration.

Other items on display include personal effects belonging to Dun, period photographs, the cast bell from the sheep pasture that once rang to mark the start and end of work, and panels covering Makomanai's modern history, including the 1972 Sapporo Winter Olympics that transformed the surrounding area.

The Park, the Statue, and the Yew-Cherry Tree

Edwin Dun Memorial Park is compact, about 24,000 square meters, lying south of the Makomanai irrigation channel. The hexagonal stone base of Edwin Dun's bronze statue stands near the center of the park, depicting Dun with a Hereford bull and a small lamb on his shoulder. The work was cast by sculptor Mine Takashi in 1964 to coincide with the museum's opening, and reliefs around the base show farm workers and horses from the early pioneer years.

Beside the memorial hall stands an unusual living curiosity: a Japanese yew tree (onko) with cherry branches growing out of its trunk. The yew once stood beside the original office building and was transplanted along with the building in 1964. The cherry sprouted naturally from the yew's wood, and each spring its flowers open from within the dark green needles of the older host.

Outside the park, the Makomanai irrigation canal that Dun had excavated in 1879 still flows along a green walking corridor. The canal itself was recognized in 2001 with its own Sapporo Urban Landscape Award.

Reaching the Memorial and What to See Nearby

The Sapporo Municipal Subway Namboku Line runs south from central Sapporo to Makomanai Station, its southern terminus. From there the memorial hall is roughly a fifteen-minute walk through quiet residential streets. The route passes the Makomanai canal and the small but well-kept Daiichi Park, which contains a sculpture titled "The Boy and the Calf" that summarizes the district's pastoral origins.

Six hundred meters north of the memorial lies the much larger Makomanai Park, built for the 1972 Sapporo Winter Olympics. Its ice arena and outdoor stadium hosted the figure skating and opening ceremony, and the grounds today are used for cherry-blossom viewing in early May and for cross-country running and skiing throughout the year. The Toyohira River Salmon Museum, which traces salmon migrations through the rivers that meet in Sapporo, is also within walking distance.

The memorial hall has no on-site parking, and the area rewards arriving on foot or by bicycle. Admission is free, the rooms are kept warm in winter, and English-language printed material is available at the entrance.