Former Hokkaido Government Office Building Red Brick Building

This guide to the Former Hokkaido Government Office Building in Sapporo follows Seijiro Hirai, a thirty-two-year-old architect trained at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute in New York, who modeled this eighteen eighty-eight structure loosely on an American statehouse after Sapporo's previous wooden headquarters burned down. It traces the two and a half million bricks fired from clay near Shiroishi and Toyohira, laid in an alternating Flemish bond pattern still visible under the paint, and the octagonal tower that made it one of the tallest buildings in Japan for its era. Look closely at the brickwork as you approach and notice the checkerboard pattern beneath the red paint.