Former Hida Porcelain Factory (EBRI)

A Clay Pipe Works That Became a Market Hall

The Former Hida Ceramics Factory (旧肥田製陶工場, Kyū-Hida Seitō Kōjō, locally called Kyū-Hida Kōjō and now trading as EBRI) is a single-storey brick and reinforced-concrete factory building of around 1951 in Higashi-Nopporo, Ebetsu City, Hokkaido, registered as a Tangible Cultural Property on 29 March 2019.

Passengers on the Hakodate Main Line see it before they see anything else in Ebetsu. The long brick flank runs parallel to the track just west of Nopporo Station, low and unbroken, with a restored chimney standing clear of the roofline. Locals used it as a landmark for decades before anyone thought to protect it.

Inside, the shell now holds bakeries, a coffee roaster, a wine shop, a greengrocer and an event floor. The brick walls were left exposed. Look up and the roof structure is visible: timber trusses spanning the full width, carrying a shallow gabled roof of metal sheeting.

Fire, Rebuilding, and the Business of Drainage Pipe

Brickmaking in Ebetsu goes back to 1891, and by the early 1900s the Hokkaido Colliery and Railway Company had put a brick plant at Nopporo. Clay from the Nopporo hills, coal from the Sorachi field and a railway to Sapporo made the district Hokkaido's centre of the trade.

Hida Fusaji arrived from Tokoname in Aichi Prefecture, a pottery town on the Chita Peninsula with its own long history of clay pipe, and set up a works at Higashi-Nopporo in 1941. The firm incorporated as Hida Seitō in May 1947 with Fusaji as its first president. Its output was industrial rather than decorative: ribbed pipe for drainage and wells, unglazed flue liners for shared chimneys, ceramic block.

In June 1951 fire destroyed the factory. What visitors walk through today is the replacement, put up between 1951 and 1953 by a company that had just lost everything and chose to rebuild in brick.

The rest of the story is a slow decline with one reprieve. The name changed to Hida Co., Ltd. in February 1971. Production stopped in December 1977. In the late 1970s the plant restarted to make heat-storage bricks for all-electric homes, then closed for good in March 1998. Ebetsu City bought the land and buildings in October 2000 to keep the structure standing.

What the Registration Recognised

The listing was made under the criterion for structures contributing to the historical landscape of the country, and the Agency for Cultural Affairs description turns on the building's awkward shape rather than any elegance.

The original brick block is T-shaped in plan. An L-shaped reinforced-concrete addition of around 1953 was attached to it, producing an outline that no architect would have drawn from scratch. The builders then faced the concrete walls of the addition in brick, so that the two campaigns read as one building from outside. It is a small decision, made for reasons of appearance by people running a pipe factory, and it is the reason the flank along the railway looks continuous today.

The recorded building area is 1,300 square metres in the national database, with the city recording 1,291.03 square metres for the ground floor. Roof framing throughout is timber truss.

The chimney has its own history. Ebetsu City dismantled the brick outdoor stack in early 2003 and rebuilt it the same summer, a reconstruction rather than an original survival. The site was recognised as Modern Industrial Heritage in February 2009, listed as a Registered Tangible Cultural Property in March 2019, and given a regional award at the 17th Public Building Awards in July 2020.

Visiting EBRI

The building reopened as a commercial complex called EBRI in March 2016, after the city selected a private operator by tender in 2014 and signed a twenty-year lease. The name compresses Ebetsu and brick. Conversion work ran through the second half of 2015.

There is no admission charge. You walk in as you would into any shopping arcade, and the heritage fabric is simply the room you are standing in. Opening hours belong to the individual tenants rather than the building, so anyone travelling specifically for the architecture should check the official site before setting out; the event floor also books out for markets and pop-ups on weekends.

Getting there is easy. Nopporo Station on the JR Hakodate Main Line is about five minutes on foot from the south exit, and Yūtetsu buses on the Ebetsu-Sapporo route stop within two minutes at Nopporo Bus Terminal or Nopporo Higashimachi. Nopporo is roughly twenty minutes by rapid service out of Sapporo Station.

Photography of the interior is generally accepted, though individual shops set their own rules and it is courteous to ask at the counter before pointing a lens at a display. The best light on the exterior brick comes in the late afternoon, when the west-facing wall along the railway warms up.

Two things reward a slow walk. Follow the inside wall until the brickwork changes character and you have found the junction between the 1951 block and the concrete addition. Then step outside and look for the same joint from the yard, where the brick facing was applied to hide it.