Hokkaido Governor's Official Residence (Former Mitsui Club)

A Corporate Villa That Became a Public House

The Hokkaido Governor's Official Residence (北海道知事公館, formerly the Mitsui Club, 旧三井クラブ) is a half-timbered mansion of 1936 standing on wooded grounds at Kita 1-jō Nishi 16-chōme in Chūō Ward, Sapporo, and it was entered on Japan's national Register of Tangible Cultural Properties on 14 October 1999.

Mitsui's connection with this ground goes back to 1915, when Mitsui Gōmei Kaisha bought land that had been mulberry fields together with the private house of Mori Genzō, a former Kaitakushi colonisation official, and converted the property into the Mitsui Sapporo Villa. It was then made available as a shared club for the eight Mitsui-affiliated companies operating in Hokkaido, which is where the alternative name comes from. The building registered today is the new wing added to that villa in December 1936.

Hokkaido acquired the property in 1953, and it has served as the governor's official residence since. Meetings and official functions still take place inside, which is the reason the opening arrangements are what they are.

Reading the Facade

Registration number 01-0014 was granted under the criterion of being a model of design. The structure is listed as reinforced concrete and timber, two storeys, roofed in copper sheet, with a building area of 392 square metres. The grounds run to roughly 5.6 hectares.

Half-timbering is the obvious feature: dark timber members set against white render, a manner of building borrowed from northern Europe and taken up widely in Japanese suburban and villa architecture of the 1920s and 1930s. In Sapporo, where snow load and long winters shaped what got built, the style also read as appropriately northern.

Look at the two gable ends. The north and south faces are treated differently from one another, and neither is symmetrical, yet the composition holds together. Above the main entrance the second floor projects forward over the first, and into that projection is set a large bay window crowned by a quatrefoil motif. That detail is the one most often photographed, and it rewards standing still for a moment rather than shooting on the walk past.

The colour does a lot of work too. Red-brown timber against white walls, copper above, and around it all a great deal of green in summer and a great deal of white in winter.

Inside, and the Ground Around It

Interiors are open without charge. Ceilings are high, rooms are generously proportioned, and the lighting fittings, chandeliers included, are original to the building. There are reception rooms on both floors with different characters. The ground-floor room, the one in most frequent use, has wide double-glazed windows looking onto the garden; staff seat guests nearest the entrance, treating that as the seat of honour precisely because of the view.

The garden is the other half of the visit, and for many Sapporo residents it is the main half. Part of the site is protected as an environmental green zone, and the ground undulates in a way that appears to preserve the original surface of the Sapporo alluvial fan. Old maps show spring-fed pools called memu on the site, feeding a stream that ran north; urban development dried them up, and water is now circulated artificially to trace the former course. Traces of pit dwellings more than a thousand years old survive within the grounds.

Cherry blossom in spring, ezo momiji colour in autumn, and Hokkaido red squirrels living in the trees year round. There is also outdoor sculpture: Yasuda Kan's white marble Ishinki, Nagare Masayuki's Sakimori 2000 and Sakimori 2002, and a bronze bust of Murahashi Hisanari, the Kaitakushi official who founded the brewery that became Sapporo Beer, placed in the front garden on ground that was once the mulberry field he had planted for silk production.

Practical points matter here more than usual, because the building is a working official residence. The residence is open 9:00 to 17:00, closed Saturdays, Sundays, public holidays and 29 December to 3 January. Admission is free and individual visitors need no reservation, but groups of about ten or more should contact the residence in advance. Official business can close the building at short notice, so a phone call before travelling is sensible.

The garden keeps its own calendar. It opens from late April to 30 November, including weekends and holidays: 8:45 to 17:30 from late April through 30 September, 8:45 to 17:00 during October, and 8:45 to 16:00 during November. It is closed from 1 December until late April, when snow makes the paths impassable.

There is no parking on site. The nearest station is Nishi 18-chōme on the Tōzai subway line, about five minutes on foot from exit 4, and the Hokkaido Museum of Modern Art bus stop is a minute away. The Museum of Modern Art and the Migishi Kōtarō Museum of Art are both immediate neighbours, which makes a half-day circuit easy to put together.