Former Hokkaido Forest Tree Breeding Station Building

A Forestry Laboratory on the Nopporo Ridge

The Former Hokkaido Forest Tree Breeding Station Office (北海道林木育種場旧庁舎, also written Hokkaidō Rinboku Ikushujō Kyū-chōsha) is a forestry research building completed in November 1927 at Bunkyodai-Midorimachi in Ebetsu City, Hokkaido, and it was entered on Japan's national Register of Tangible Cultural Properties on 28 August 2001.

Ebetsu City records the construction cost at roughly 135,000 yen and the build time at eight months. That was fast work for a two-storey block of this size, and the money bought quality: this is a building put up before wartime rationing began to thin out Japanese construction materials in the late 1930s.

The station itself was older than the building. Forestry trials had begun in 1908 at Shibunbetsu, in what is now western Nopporo, on an experimental forest of some 3,426 hectares. In 1927 the operation moved uphill to its present site, and the new office became the centre of research into northern forests: soil science, artificial afforestation, timber utilisation, forest chemistry. The Agency for Cultural Affairs describes the building as having been erected for the Hokkaido Government forestry experiment station, while Ebetsu City's own chronology names it the Hokkaido branch office of the Home Ministry Forestry Experiment Station. The two labels reflect the tangled administrative history of forestry research in prewar Hokkaido rather than any doubt about the building.

Names kept changing around it. Hokkaido Forestry Experiment Station under the Home Ministry from 1933. Sapporo branch of the Ministry of Agriculture and Forestry's Forestry Experiment Station from 1947. From April 1957, the Hokkaido Forest Tree Breeding Station of the Forestry Agency, which is the name the building now carries. Research on improved varieties and, later, on tree genetics continued here until March 1996, when a new headquarters opened next door and the old office fell empty.

Why the Building Was Registered

Registration number 01-0030 was granted under the criterion of contributing to the historical landscape of the country. The reasoning is easy to see from the road below: the building sits on high ground at the northern edge of Nopporo Forest Park, and its white upper storey reads as a marker across the flat farmland of the Ishikari plain.

The construction is a hybrid, and that is the interesting part. The ground floor is load-bearing brick masonry. The second floor and the attic are timber, finished in a half-timbered manner popular in Japan through the Taishō and early Shōwa years. Over the whole exterior goes a washed-mortar render, a finish in which aggregate is exposed by washing the surface before the mortar fully sets. The roof is sheet iron over a queen-post-style truss.

The Agency for Cultural Affairs lists a building area of 744 square metres. Ebetsu City breaks the floors out separately: 743.64 square metres on the ground floor, 649.12 on the second, 139.12 in the attic, for a total floor area of 1,531.88 square metres. By the standards of a 1920s Hokkaido research institute, that is a large building.

Interior joinery survives well. Wooden doors, dado panelling and wooden window frames were specified throughout, and the ceilings, wall treatments and stair balustrade were given more care than a purely functional laboratory would have required.

What to Look for on a Visit

Come in through the stone gate posts. They frame the facade from a distance and are worth a pause before you walk up.

From the front, the eye goes first to the contrast between the two storeys: the heavier brick base, then the lighter framed upper floor with its dark timber grid against pale render. Walk round to the side and the windows change character, narrow and tall in a way that modern buildings rarely attempt. The gable end carries decorative work at the apex that repays a closer look.

One date matters more than the others. On 7 October 1936, during army grand manoeuvres in Hokkaido, the Shōwa emperor visited the experiment station. A temporary imperial seat was set up on the second floor, where he received a report from station director Ishihara Kyōzō before walking the experimental forest with Prince Chichibu and Prince Mikasa. Photographs from that day are displayed near the entrance.

The building is not a museum, and that is what makes it easy to see. After Ebetsu City bought the land and building from the state in January 2002, the city opened it as a rest stop while it worked out a long-term use. A public call for a conservation and utilisation operator in 2020 drew four applicants; the coffee company Kōbō Sapporo Coffee Kan was selected. Renovation followed in 2021, the company moved its head office in during April 2022, and on 11 May 2022 its café Rinboku opened on the ground floor.

So you can sit down inside a registered cultural property with a cup of coffee. Reported opening hours are 9:30 to 18:00 with last orders around 17:00, closed Mondays, with roughly 36 seats and parking for 11 cars. Hours at a small independent café change, so check before travelling. Photography of the exterior is unrestricted; inside, treat it as you would any café and keep other customers out of frame.

Getting here takes a little planning. The site is tucked behind a residential district on the eastern edge of Rakuno Gakuen University, and the nearest stations on the JR Hakodate Main Line, Nopporo and Ōasa, are each roughly two kilometres away. Driving from central Sapporo takes about half an hour. Navigate by map rather than by instinct: the approach road is easy to miss.