Hokusei Gakuen Centennial Memorial Hall (Former Hokusei Girls' School Missionary Residence)

A Missionary Residence Built for Sapporo Winters

The Hokusei Gakuen Centennial Hall, formerly the Hokusei Girls' School Missionary Residence (北星学園創立百周年記念館（旧北星女学校宣教師館）, also written Hokusei Gakuen Sōritsu Hyakushūnen Kinenkan), is a three-storey timber building of 1926 in Minami 4-jo Nishi 17, Chuo Ward, Sapporo, entered on Japan's list of Registered Tangible Cultural Properties in 1998.

It is small. The floor area comes to 175 square metres, which for a three-storey house is modest, and the building sits inside a school campus rather than on a boulevard. What draws the eye from the street is the roof: steeply pitched, dropping almost to the height of the ground-floor windows before flaring outward at the eaves. Mustard-yellow walls, green window frames, green roof. Students have long called it the Pumpkin House.

The pitch is not decoration. Snow slides off a roof at that angle instead of accumulating on it, and Sapporo receives around five metres of snowfall in an average winter. The large windows on the south side answer the other northern problem, which is the shortness of the winter day.

Two Foreign Architects and One Small House

The Agency for Cultural Affairs records that the basic design came from the American architect William Merrell Vories, with working drawings prepared by Max Hinder, a Swiss architect then living in Sapporo. Hokusei Gakuen's own account of the building credits Hinder with the design and does not mention Vories, so the division of authorship is worth treating as an open question rather than a settled one.

Vories built a large body of work for Protestant missions across Japan from his base in Omi-Hachiman. Hinder is the more local figure here. During roughly three and a half years in Sapporo he produced around twenty buildings, adapting European alpine habits of construction to Hokkaido's snow load: the flared steep roof, the deep eaves, sheet metal fixed over the timber walls for weather protection. Nearly all of that work is now gone. Apart from this house, the surviving Hinder buildings in Sapporo are two mountain huts belonging to Hokkaido University.

The house was put up in December 1926 for women missionaries sent by an American mission board. Hokusei Gakuen itself dates from 1887, when Sarah C. Smith opened a girls' school in Sapporo. Smith never lived here. By 1926 she had handed the running of the school to Principal A. M. Monk, who is said to have been the building's first occupant.

What followed reads as a record of the century. When the Pacific War began and the missionaries returned to the United States, the house became a music room. They came back after 1945 and lived in it again. In 1960 a new school building forced the house to be shifted north on the site, after which it served as junior college offices, a library and club rooms. By then it was too worn to live in.

Restored for the Centenary, and What to See Inside

In 1987 the school resolved to move and repair the building as part of its centenary programme, and restoration work followed in 1989. The house was set at the centre of the courtyard and returned to its original colouring, the mustard walls and green trim reinstated from the evidence of the 1926 scheme. The name it carries today comes from that project.

Recognition arrived in stages. Sapporo listed it among the city's Hundred Cultural Landmarks in 1988, national registration followed in 1998, and in 2005 the city designated it an Important Building for Urban Landscape and gave it a Sapporo Urban Landscape Award.

Inside, the original room layout survives, and the rooms now hold furnishings from the missionary period along with documents from the school's history. Visitors interested in Japan's Protestant girls' schools will find the domestic scale of the place instructive: this is not an institutional building but a house, planned for a handful of foreign women living far from home in a city that was itself only fifty years old when they moved in.

Opening is limited and seasonal. The hall is open from April to October, on Mondays, Wednesdays and Fridays, from 12:00 to 17:00, and closes on public holidays. From November to March it is shut, with enquiries handled by the Hokusei Gakuen general affairs office. The building is roughly seven minutes on foot south of Exit 2 at Nishi-Jūhatchōme Station on the Tozai subway line. Since it stands within a girls' junior and senior high school campus, photograph the building rather than the surrounding school, and check at the entrance before photographing indoors.