Sapporo City Former Mitsubishi Mining Dormitory

A Company Clubhouse Grafted onto a Meiji Mansion

The Sapporo City Former Mitsubishi Mining Dormitory (札幌市旧三菱鉱業寮, also written Sapporo-shi Kyū-Mitsubishi Kōgyō-ryō) is a two-storey wooden building of around 1937 in Chūō Ward, Sapporo, Hokkaido, registered as a National Registered Tangible Cultural Property on 10 September 2019. It occupies the northern half of a single roofline that begins, at the southern end, with a Meiji-period residence built for the army officer Nagayama Takeshirō.

Two buildings, sixty years apart, share one entrance path.

The sequence began in 1911, when Mitsubishi Gōshi Kaisha bought Nagayama's house and its grounds. Around 1937 the mining arm of the company pulled down the northern portion of the old residence and put up this club in its place, keeping the surviving Meiji rooms as a guest suite for visiting executives. The new wing runs to about 278 square metres of floor area, with a gabled roof in sheet metal, horizontal clapboard on the ground floor, and mortar finished with a brush stroke above.

Look at the gable ends. The dark timbering set against pale plaster is a half-timber motif, a shorthand for European domesticity that Japanese architects of the late 1930s used freely on corporate and suburban buildings. Round windows punctuate the walls. Neither element is structural; both are there to signal that this was a place for leisure rather than work.

Why the Building Was Registered

The Agency for Cultural Affairs registered the building under the criterion "a model of design," and the reasoning turns on scarcity. Private companies in prewar Japan built clubs and dormitories in large numbers for their managerial staff, but few in Hokkaido survived the postwar decades intact. Mitsubishi Mining ran coal operations across the island and metal mines beyond it, and this house in central Sapporo was where the people directing that work slept, ate and entertained.

Its plan is plain enough to read from a floor guide: a corridor down the middle of each storey, rooms opening to either side, the upper floor given over to tatami bedrooms. That arrangement, a Western exterior wrapped around Japanese sleeping quarters, was standard for the type and is now rare to see in place.

Sapporo received the property from Mitsubishi Mining & Cement in 1985 and opened it to visitors from 1989. Repairs were carried out that first year and again in 2017, the latter as part of a conservation project that ran from November 2016 to March 2018. The complex reopened in June 2018 with a café and exhibition rooms installed on the ground floor.

The older half of the complex carries its own protection. The Former Nagayama Takeshirō Residence was designated a Hokkaido Prefectural Tangible Cultural Property on 27 November 1987, so a single visit takes in two different tiers of the Japanese heritage system.

What to Look At

Entry is free, and the doors stay open from 9:00 until 22:00, which is unusually late for a heritage house in Japan. The building closes on the second Wednesday of each month, moving to the following day when that Wednesday is a public holiday, and over the New Year period.

Inside the 1937 Wing

The gallery space on the ground floor keeps its round windows, and they are worth a minute of attention from the inside, where the circle frames a slice of park rather than a view of the street. A history room nearby lays out the site's chronology on panels and screens. There is a small reading room holding books on Sapporo and Hokkaido history, and a hall whose windows face the green of Nagayama Memorial Park.

Upstairs, three tatami rooms of different sizes are rented out for meetings and events, so what you find open on any given day varies. The building has no lift, and the staircase is the original run.

Next Door, and Outside

The Meiji rooms to the south include a fifteen-mat formal chamber with a built-in writing alcove, and a Western-style parlour whose ceiling rose carries a maple-leaf design. The two rooms connect directly, which was the point of the design and the reason architectural historians keep citing the house.

The garden holds mature Somei-Yoshino cherries that flower in early May, later than Honshu by a month. Nagayama Rest, the café on the ground floor of the 1937 wing, serves curry and Western dishes from 11:00 on weekdays until 19:00, and until 20:00 at weekends and on holidays; it takes the same monthly closure as the building.

Casual photography for personal use is fine. Shoots that go beyond that, including commercial and location work, require a written application to the management office in advance, and group visits should be notified ahead of time as well.