Meiji

Preserved at Museum Abashiri Prison in Hokkaido, the Former Abashiri Prison Chapel and Administration Building are nationally designated Important Cultural Properties rebuilt in 1912. Their unique Japanese-Western hybrid design tells the story of Meiji-era penal architecture and Hokkaido's pioneer past.

Established in 1896 on a forested hillside west of Abashiri City, the Futamigaoka Branch is one of Japan's only agricultural prison complexes and the oldest surviving wooden prison architecture in the country. Four buildings—the kitchen, the chapel and dining hall, the key and chain attachment office, and the inmate quarters—are designated as Important Cultural Properties, spanning the Meiji, Taisho, and early Showa eras. Relocated to the Abashiri Prison Museum in 1999, the complex offers a rare and vivid window onto the evolution of Japanese penal architecture.

This 1877 wooden office shows how the Hokkaido Development Commission's builders copied American pattern books, visible in its ridge ornament and porch gable.

The former Hanada family bansho on Hokkaido's coast is a herring fishery from around 1905. The largest surviving bansho in Hokkaido, it once lodged some 200 crews.

Built in 1901 by prosperous rice merchant Zenkichi Tachikawa, this two-story brick warehouse-style store in Hakodate masterfully blends Western arched facades with traditional Japanese upper-story design. Designated as a national Important Cultural Property in 1971—the first private residence in Hokkaido to receive this honor—the building survived the devastating 1907 Hakodate Great Fire and stands as an outstanding example of Meiji-era treaty port merchant architecture.

Completed in 1906 and designated as a nationally Important Cultural Property, this two-story stone building in the Early Modern European Revival style features exquisite interiors adorned with kinkarakawakami gold-tooled leather paper, ornate plaster ceilings, and marble fireplaces. It served as the venue for the historic Japan-Russia Karafuto Border Demarcation Conference and reopened in April 2025 following extensive restoration.

Built by the Kaitakushi in 1880 and opened as Emperor Meiji's lodging, this white clapboard hotel in Sapporo's Nakajima Park keeps its ultramarine trim.

Nine Meiji farm buildings on the Hokkaido University campus, built on Clark's plan for large-scale stock farming. Free entry, three barns open inside each summer.

A thatched settler farmhouse in Date City left by the Watari Date migration. Two rooms and an earth floor, heavily framed, with a plan echoed by later militia huts.

Asahikawa's last surviving army riding hall, built in brick for winter cavalry drill. Iron Fink trusses span it, and a bus company services vehicles inside it today.

Built in 1899 to season carriage timber, this square brick building in Asahikawa shows Flemish bond walls, three-centred gable arches and overburnt brick trim.

Where carriage woodwork was cut and fitted from 1899, this Asahikawa brick workshop pairs broad arched windows with slit openings and now serves as a public hall.

This small wooden building in Hidaka Town, Hokkaido keeps two formal rooms salvaged in 1951 from a 1911 imperial lodging, under a coved coffered ceiling in hinoki.

Facing the Pacific in Hidaka Town, Hokkaido, this late Meiji house joins a Western reception room to two tatami rooms by a corridor turning a right angle.

A Meiji-era wooden office in southern Sapporo, built in 1887, honoring Edwin Dun, the Ohio rancher who founded Hokkaido's dairy industry from Makomanai in 1876.

A hexagonal cabin on a brick cylinder, built in 1909 to supply a Sapporo army garrison. Registered in 2001, it stands offshore in Nishioka Park, free to view.

The brick portal of the Tenryu pit's material-haulage incline of 1900, its walls five bricks thick framing a semicircular arch with pilasters and a name plaque.

The brick portal of the Tenryu pit's man-car incline, where carriages took miners underground, eleven metres wide with a conical keystone, pilasters and wing walls.

Step inside Japan's only publicly walkable coal mine: a 180-metre brick-arched tunnel in Yubari, Hokkaidō, with a real coal seam to touch, vintage shearers, and an 1888 origin story.

A 1911 timber rice granary at Takaoka in Ishikari, Hokkaido, registered in 2024. A single central post carries the ridge beam; the interior is not open to visitors.