Horoizumi Lighthouse Memorial Tower

A Concrete Lighthouse That Outlasted Its Own Hill

The Horoizumi Lighthouse Memorial Tower (幌泉灯台記念塔, Horoizumi Tōdai Kinentō) is a reinforced-concrete lighthouse in Erimo Town, Horoizumi District, Hokkaido, completed in 1928 and entered on Japan's national Registry of Tangible Cultural Properties on 5 December 2019. It no longer shows a light. It stands on a flat lawn in a municipal park, and the hill it was designed for is gone.

That hill was called Tōdaiyama, Lighthouse Mountain, and it rose directly behind the fishing harbour. The tower on its summit was the second lighthouse to occupy the spot; an earlier wooden one is said to have been put up during the Meiji period. In 1928 the wooden structure gave way to concrete, a material then only beginning to be used for Japanese lighthouses.

Fifty years of service followed. By the 1970s the town had grown around the base of the hill, and street lamps and house windows were competing with the beam. The Coast Guard built a replacement on Kannonyama, also known as Sumiyoshiyama, and the Horoizumi light was decommissioned in 1978.

What happened next is unusual. A retired lighthouse is normally demolished. Erimo asked the state for the structure instead, and in the same year the national highway skirting the base of the hill was being straightened. The hill was cut away for harbour works and the road realignment, and a park was laid out over the cleared ground. The tower was re-erected at the centre of it, at approximately the same point on the map where it had always stood, but now at sea level rather than on a summit.

Why an Empty Tower Was Worth Registering

The Agency for Cultural Affairs registered the tower under the criterion of being a model of design, and its official description is unusually specific about the reason: the building preserves the early form of Japan's reinforced-concrete lighthouses.

Concrete arrived in Japanese lighthouse construction after the masonry and iron era, and the first generation of concrete towers did not yet look like the plain white cylinders most people picture. They were built by engineers who still thought in the vocabulary of Western classical architecture, and they wore that vocabulary openly.

Horoizumi shows this clearly. The shaft is a square prism, not a cone or a cylinder. The doorway is capped by a semicircular arch carried on corbels. The corners of the walls are cut with a karadomen, a bevelled moulding profile taken from traditional joinery, so the edges read as deliberate lines rather than raw angles. Around the top runs a cornice fitted with dentils, the small repeating blocks familiar from Greek and Roman entablatures. The lantern room at the summit is pierced by iron-framed windows.

Very few towers of this generation survive with their detailing intact, and fewer still survive after being lifted off their site and put down again. That combination is what the registration recognises.

One measurement deserves a note. The national database records the tower as 11 metres high with a building area of 13 square metres. Erimo Town's own tourism page gives the height as 9 metres, with a footprint of 3.65 by 4.15 metres. The Agency for Cultural Affairs figure is the one used in the official register, and this article follows it; the discrepancy may come from measuring to different points, or from the change of ground level at the time of the move.

Standing at the Foot of It

Tōdai Kōen, Lighthouse Park, is in the middle of Erimo's town centre, on Route 336 heading toward Cape Erimo. There is no gate and no ticket office. The park is open ground with a lawn, public toilets and an event stage, and the tower occupies the centre of it.

Photography is unrestricted. Because the tower is white and squared off, it takes strong shadow well, and the surface finish is kept fresh: the local chamber of commerce youth division and other volunteers repaint it periodically, which is why a structure approaching a century old looks so crisp.

Walk right up to the base. The details that earned the registration are all at eye level or just above, and they reward a close look far more than a photograph from the road does. The corbelled arch over the entrance is the easiest to read. The lantern windows, empty of their optic since the light was removed, are the hardest thing to see from below and worth stepping back for.

The interior is not open, and the lighting apparatus was taken out when the tower was decommissioned, so there is nothing to climb to.

Mid-August changes the setting completely. The Erimo Lighthouse Festival is held here every year from 14 to 16 August, with stalls, stage events and fireworks on the middle night, and the tower becomes the backdrop rather than the subject. Visitors who want the structure to themselves should come outside those dates.

Erimo has no railway station. Reaching the park means a local bus or a car; Cape Erimo, with its wind museum and seal colony, is about thirty minutes further south by road. The town's local history museum, Horoizumi, holds the material on the lighthouse and on Erimo's other cultural properties, including the Saruru Sandō, a nationally designated historic road.