Seed and Seedling Storehouse, Hokkaido Konsen Agricultural Experiment Station

A Building Designed Around What Seeds Need

The Seed and Seedling Storehouse of the Hokkaido Konsen Agricultural Experiment Station (北海道立根釧農業試験場種苗倉庫, formerly the Nemuro Branch of the Hokkaido Agricultural Experiment Station) stands at 1-1-3 Sakuragaoka in Nakashibetsu Town, eastern Hokkaido, was built in 1928, and was entered on the national register of Tangible Cultural Properties on 7 August 2009.

Start with the problem the building had to solve. Seed grain and nursery stock spoil if they get damp, sprout if they get warm, and die outright if they freeze. On the Konsen plateau the ground freezes deep, summer brings sea fog off the Pacific, and an experiment station that loses its seed stock loses several years of breeding work along with it. The answer had to be architectural, because in 1928 there was nothing else available.

So the floor was lifted 60 centimetres clear of the ground, putting an air gap between the stored contents and the cold, wet earth. The interior was divided into two rooms, east and west, which allows different stock to be kept under different conditions instead of sharing one climate. Two storeys of timber under a sheet-iron roof gave 79 square metres of footprint and roughly twice that in usable volume, on a plan measuring 11 metres by 7.3.

Then there is the roof, which is the reason people stop and photograph this building rather than the plain shed next door.

The Roof, and Where Its Shape Came From

The Agency for Cultural Affairs describes the structure as a gable-roofed timber building of two storeys and then, in the same paragraph, calls the appearance a koshiore roof: a gable whose pitch breaks partway down, steep above the eaves and shallower toward the ridge. English-speaking readers will know the profile as a gambrel. Two dormer windows pierce the front slope and two more the rear.

That shape is not a decorative flourish. Breaking the pitch buys headroom across almost the whole width of the upper floor, where a simple gable would waste the outer thirds on cramped angles. Anyone storing sacks needs to walk between them, and the gambrel lets a person stand upright a metre from the wall. The dormers then bring in light and let humid air escape at the highest point in the room.

The profile also carries a history. Gambrel and mansard barns arrived in Hokkaido with the American agricultural advisers of the Meiji period and became the signature outline of the island's dairy districts, so common around Nakashibetsu that visitors sometimes assume they are looking at imported buildings rather than Japanese ones. Here the form appears on a government research building of 1928, drawn by the Architecture Section of the Hokkaido Government Public Works Department according to town records, which suggests the type had already been absorbed into official practice by then.

The walls follow the same restrained logic as the rest of the campus: clapboard across the upper portion, posts and window surrounds picked out in white. Records note a renovation around 1983, so not every surface visible today dates from the 1920s.

Its Place in a Registered Group

Registration came under the criterion covering buildings that contribute to the historic landscape of the nation, with register number 01-0100. The storehouse was one of four buildings from the old Nemuro Branch added to the register together in August 2009.

The branch station itself opened in 1927 under the Second-Period Hokkaido Colonization Plan, a national programme aimed at bringing the eastern grasslands into production. Nakashibetsu grew up around it. The concrete office block of that first year, now called Denseikan after the station's first director Matsuno Den, stands to the southeast of the seed store; the timber implement storehouse is immediately to the west; the former exhibition hall was moved north to a park in 1982 and now serves as the Midorigaoka Annex of the municipal folk museum.

What the seed store contributes to that group is evidence of function. The office announces institutional ambition in reinforced concrete. This building shows what the institution actually did all day: keep breeding material alive through a winter that runs from November into April, so that the following spring's trials could go ahead. The research programme that eventually turned this district into one of Japan's principal dairy regions depended on that unglamorous continuity. The successor institution, now the Dairy Research Station of the Hokkaido Research Organization, still works nearby.

Visiting, and Being Realistic About It

Nakashibetsu Town states that general public entry to the Seed and Seedling Storehouse is not normally permitted, on disease control grounds tied to the research site. There is no interior tour and no admission arrangement. Viewing is from the public road, and since the gambrel profile and the dormers are the point, the outside is where to look anyway. Exterior photography from public land is unrestricted; stepping onto the grounds requires permission in advance.

Visitors who want to get inside a building from this group should head for the Midorigaoka Annex at 4-3-1 Maruyama, free of charge, published as open on weekends and public holidays between May and October. The museum's own site has been carrying a notice of year-round closure, so telephone the main museum on 0153-72-2190 first. Denseikan is looked after by a local non-profit and can be seen by prior arrangement on 0153-73-4301.

Nemuro Nakashibetsu Airport links the town with Tokyo Haneda and Sapporo; the connecting bus runs to the Nakashibetsu bus terminal in about ten minutes for 240 yen. Akan Bus takes roughly two hours and twenty minutes from Kushiro station. No railway serves the town since the Shibetsu Line closed in 1989, so a rental car saves a great deal of waiting. The Jinja-mae stop leaves a short walk to the Sakuragaoka site.

Winter has an argument in its favour here, whatever the inconvenience. Snow flattens the surrounding colour to white and grey, and the broken silhouette of the gambrel, with four dormers punched through it, becomes the only complicated shape in view.