Sapporo: The Ground beneath the Government

The government building that gave early Sapporo its commanding silhouette is gone. The Kaitakushi, the agency established to develop and govern Hokkaidō, completed its wooden headquarters in October 1873. Fire destroyed it six years later. Its position lies east of the familiar Red Brick Office, which belongs to a different administration and was completed in 1888.^[1][2]

That small displacement contains a larger history. Institutions changed names, buildings disappeared, and their successors continued deciding how land would be occupied and used. Beneath the apparent solidity of a government quarter lay decisions about boundaries, evidence, and whose occupation would become ownership.

Sapporo's historic administrative area preserves several parts of this process: the headquarters site, the later office, the central street grid, and the former college drill hall now called the Clock Tower. Reading them together raises a question that the grandeur of any one building cannot answer: how did governing from this place change the ground on which other people lived?

Water gave the area around central Sapporo its earlier organization. The Toyohira River had built an alluvial fan, a spread of deposited gravel and sediment through which groundwater moved. Springs, called mem in Ainu, supplied streams and wetlands. Many subsequently dried up as the city developed, making an earlier waterscape harder to recognize beneath its streets.^[3]

Ainu communities lived around the waterways near the future government quarter. Their settlement history cannot be confined to the footprint of the surviving office: no intact village stands there for comparison. Archaeological evidence from the wider city and the history of its rivers establish the inhabited setting into which the capital was introduced. Fishing, hunting, gathering, and trade connected places that a later street plan would divide differently.^[4]

A river, in such a landscape, was more than a blue line between blocks. Access to one part of it could connect a household with food, materials, and other people. A map that recorded only permanent buildings would miss much of that relationship. This is a limitation of the map, not evidence that the unbuilt ground had no use.

Nor did Japanese intervention begin with the Meiji government. Before the Kaitakushi's establishment in 1869, the area had experienced Wajin trade—Wajin being the term commonly used here for non-Ainu Japanese—and coercive labor. A shogunate road linking Zenibako and Chitose opened in 1857. Ōtomo Kamejirō's canal and agricultural work also preceded the new capital.^[4]

These earlier connections matter because they change the starting point. Sapporo was new as an administrative city, not as a place where people lived or outsiders exercised power. The Kaitakushi inherited a landscape already worked, traveled, and contested. Its novelty lay in the scale and organization of the institutions it put there.

The new administration wanted a governing center farther inland than Hakodate, Hokkaidō's southern port. Sapporo would place it closer to the territory it intended to develop. In 1871, the official Iwamura Michitoshi laid out the foundations of the new town. The broad street that became Ōdōri separated a northern government district, with Western-style buildings, from residential and commercial districts to the south.^[5][6]

This arrangement made authority physically conspicuous, but its practical work extended beyond the headquarters. Sapporo Agricultural College, established in 1876, trained personnel for the development program. Its 1878 drill hall combined teaching and collections downstairs with military drill and ceremonies above. The clock was added in 1881. The building now known as the Clock Tower was moved roughly a hundred meters in 1906, after the college itself had relocated in 1903.^[7]

The distinction between those dates prevents an attractive survivor from fixing the entire neighborhood in one moment. Its building is authentic, but its position changed. Its famous clock came after its educational purpose. Alongside the headquarters, the hall shows that administering a territory required trained people as well as a prominent place for officials to sit.

The agency's headquarters was less fortunate. Excavation in 1968 identified chimney foundations and postholes belonging to the lost building. The remains were covered for protection; their location, near the flagpole area east of the brick office, is marked rather than reconstructed as a standing façade.^[1]

Here, archaeology supplies a useful restraint on the imagination. It fixes where one administration worked without pretending to restore its daily conversations. To understand those, the surviving streets and foundations need a different kind of companion: documents showing what officials actually had to decide.

A new land system could not operate by drawing boundaries alone. Someone had to determine what the boundaries enclosed, who would receive a certificate, and how an existing use should be translated into a legally recognized claim. The early correspondence reaching Sapporo shows that these were live questions, not details settled once and for all by a proclamation.

The Hokkaidō Land Regulations of 1872 addressed forests and waterways already used by Ainu for fishing, hunting, and timber. Article Seven envisaged division and land certificates. Its meaning has divided historians: did it recognize Ainu ownership, or enable others to acquire the land? A 2022 study by Ushio Hiroya and Hashimoto Seiichi returned to administrative correspondence rather than treating the wording alone as decisive.^[8]

In May 1873, the Nemuro branch sent questions to Sapporo about applying the regulations. An associated draft answer deferred action pending the arrival of Kuroda Kiyotaka, the agency's deputy director; the surviving draft lacks evidence of formal approval. Another inquiry came from land-certificate officials in 1876. Hashimoto concludes that the officials examined understood Ainu as included within the provision, while warning that this does not establish that ownership was immediately granted.^[8]

The difference is consequential. An intention to recognize a right, an instruction to investigate it, and a certificate actually delivered to its holder are three different outcomes. The paperwork does not allow them to be folded into one reassuring statement about equal treatment. Equally, reading every early clause as an identical instrument of confiscation would conceal how the system changed.

These questions traveled through an administrative network extending far beyond Sapporo. They do not prove that a particular answer was composed in a particular surviving room. They do show why a headquarters mattered: local uncertainties were referred upward, and recognition depended on decisions within an institution whose authority was expanding over the land concerned. A settled-looking capital could preside over an unsettled property system.

The rules subsequently became more restrictive. Under the land-certificate ordinance issued in December 1877, Ainu residential lands were, in principle, assigned to a government-land category known as Class III. Exceptions were possible. The category nevertheless separated continued occupation from recognized private ownership.^[9]

The historian Ōsaka Taku follows the consequences through records produced by the Kaitakushi's Sapporo administration and its successor, Sapporo Prefecture. One case concerns Toyokawa Annoran and others in Ishikari, who sought certificates for land they said had been assigned for communal use around 1873. Their application was forwarded in 1882. Officials later found no confirming allocation record, declined ownership, and retained the ground for a proposed agricultural assistance scheme. That scheme never operated in Ishikari. Toyokawa subsequently obtained a lease in 1890 and a purchase in 1895, although Ōsaka cannot establish that these were the same parcels.^[9]

The case brings the capital's work into sharper focus than a general contrast between settlers and officials. There was an existing claim, an attempt to secure it through paperwork, a search for evidence, and a decision made on the government's terms. Missing documentation carried a practical consequence for people already associated with the land. The prospect of assistance did not, by itself, give them control of it.

Toyokawa also prevents the account from becoming a story in which Ainu people only receive what happens to them. His repeated efforts to obtain land are documented actions. They need neither invented speeches nor an imagined private response to become significant.

The surviving office should therefore be understood as one end of relationships extending to places such as Ishikari, not as the location of every event in them. The ground at issue lay elsewhere. The classification, correspondence, and institutional authority connect that ground to Sapporo. A colonial capital could change possession at a distance through decisions that left no obvious mark on its own façade.

Property certificates were only one means by which the usable landscape narrowed. Sapporo's official historical interpretation links restrictions on salmon and trout fishing in tributaries of the Ishikari River with the relocation of many local Ainu to Barato and to Chikabumi in Asahikawa. These movements belonged to different local circumstances, not a single removal order that can be dated from the laying out of the city grid.^[6]

An Ainu account explains what can disappear even when a population map seems unchanged. In a September 2008 presentation to a government advisory panel, the chair of the Hokkaido Utari Association—the organization subsequently named the Ainu Association of Hokkaido—emphasized that people could lose land and resources without physically moving. Access could be taken while they remained where they were. He connected this loss with the interruption of social, economic, and spiritual relationships, and also described forced relocations within Hokkaidō.^[10]

That is a modern Ainu organization's account of historical experience, not an eyewitness report from the 1870s. Its analytical force lies in the distinction it asks the reader to make. A household's address cannot tell us whether it still had access to its fishing places, materials, or customary activities. Nor does the survival of a community mean that the conditions sustaining it remained intact.

Set beside the capital's documents, this perspective changes what must be asked of an administrative decision. A surveyed residential plot and a functioning livelihood were not interchangeable. Protecting one could leave the other unsecured. The association's intervention also belongs to an ongoing history of Ainu people contesting how their relationship with the state is described; they are participants in that discussion, not simply its historical subject.

The Kaitakushi was abolished in 1882. A short period of three-prefecture administration followed before the Hokkaidō Government was established in 1886. Its new brick headquarters was completed in 1888. Thus the building that most readily represents the founding era was constructed after the founding agency had disappeared.^[2]

The successor government continued making land available for incoming settlement. Its land-selection program investigated terrain, identified sites for agriculture and towns, and organized their allocation. The office's own exhibition connects this undertaking both to immigrant settlement and to losses of gathering, hunting, and fishing grounds for existing inhabitants.^[11]

Selection was an intermediate step between claiming a territory and placing new households upon it. A broad ambition needed to become particular locations and boundaries. From that perspective, the office and the survey belonged to the same process: one concentrated the authority to allocate; the other supplied the spatial information allocation required. Neither could reveal the full value of an existing landscape simply by naming what future settlers might produce there.

The building also embodied the technical capacities that the administration had fostered. Its principal designer, Hirai Seijirō, studied engineering at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute in the United States and entered Kaitakushi service in 1881. He later worked on the new headquarters under its successor. His career crossed the institutional break that the two buildings make visible.^[12]

This continuity was more specific than a general adoption of Western appearances. An engineer trained abroad could serve successive Japanese institutions, applying acquired expertise to a government building. The red-brick exterior belongs within that history of technical work, while the decisions made behind it belong within the history of governing land. Appreciating the first does not answer the questions raised by the second.

Even the 1888 office does not preserve a single construction date throughout. Fire in 1909 gutted the interior while leaving the outer masonry. Restoration of the working building was completed in 1911. The exhibition's account of fire-damaged material describes fused glass, plaster, and nails, a reminder that a surviving shell can enclose a substantially later interior.^[12][13]

The repair also changed the building's provisions. Fire doors had been included in the original design but omitted for reasons of cost; they were installed after the disaster. Patterned metal ceiling panels supplied by the Australian firm Wunderlich belong to the post-fire rebuilding. Those panels are evidence of an imported construction product used in repair, rather than decoration untouched since the first opening.^[14][15]

The later preservation campaign made a different choice. By the 1960s, the octagonal tower had long been absent, removed in the 1890s. Restorers sought to recover the early exterior. With original construction drawings unavailable, they enlarged old photographs and counted bricks to calculate dimensions. The restored tower and other features were completed in 1968.^[2]

Counting bricks was an exacting use of evidence. It could help answer how large an architectural element had been. It could not restore every former activity or make the chosen appearance the only authentic phase of the building. The early silhouette, the post-fire interior, and the later conservation work represent different decisions about what should endure.

The headquarters site nearby sets another limit: recovering the brick office's early appearance did not recover the lost Kaitakushi building. One survives partly through reconstruction of its own features; the other through protected archaeological remains. Their association is historically meaningful precisely because their identities are kept separate. The physical evidence invites a layered history. Commemorative storytelling has sometimes preferred a cleaner beginning.

In 1969, Hokkaidō commissioned twenty large paintings about its development to mark the Red Brick Office's designation as an Important Cultural Property. The present official introduction acknowledges that the works largely centered Wajin settlers and policymakers, with Ainu and other ethnic minorities scarcely represented. They preserve assumptions of the time in which they were commissioned as well as depictions of the earlier events chosen for commemoration.^[16]

There is a revealing tension within the official online guide, checked in September 2026. Its account of the area's waterways identifies Ainu communities around the future government precinct. Yet the text accompanying a painting of Sapporo's founding describes the official Shima Yoshitake planning to transform an “uninhabited wilderness” into a city. The painting concerns a scene set in 1869; it is not contemporary visual documentation of that year.^[4][5][16]

The phrase might evoke terrain without a dense town. Read as an account of Sapporo's beginnings, however, it can encourage the absence of urban buildings to become the absence of inhabitants. The guide's broader acknowledgement and its individual caption do not quite tell the same story. This does not establish the intentions of the painter or every curator. It shows how an inherited account can persist inside an institution that is also revising it.

The land correspondence offers a less sweeping beginning. Officials sought explanations, deferred decisions, classified occupied ground, and considered claims that did not fit securely into their records. Ainu applicants tried to obtain recognition within that system. Rivers remained significant even where streets gave the city a new order. None of these histories can be recovered simply by restoring a tower.

Sapporo's administrative heritage becomes most revealing when its several kinds of evidence are allowed to correct one another. Foundations locate a vanished headquarters. Building records separate construction from repair. Petitions expose what classifications meant to people away from the capital. Ainu accounts identify losses an administrative map may not register. Together they explain how government made a city here—and why making a city was never the same thing as beginning the history of the place.