Day 3, Sapporo

For today, the planning was to do some sightseeing in Sapporo (the next two days I will venture into the wilds of Hokkaido). Even though Sapporo is one of the lesser known cities of Japan (among foreign tourists), it has more than 1.6 million inhabitants. Maybe this is because the city is only about 150 years old. It wasn’t until the 19th century that the Japanese first started ‘colonizing’ Hokkaido. To speed up this colonization, the government gave bonuses to people from the main islands that were willing to settle on the northern island. This turned out to be quite efficient, because within several years the original population of Hokkaido, the Ainu, comparable to the Indians or aboriginals, was already a minority. And, as usual in such situations, the Ainu have since been oppressed and discriminated. In recent years the situation has improved somewhat, and their history is getting more attention nowadays.

In this line, one of the sights I visited today was a small Ainu museum. Interestingly, their art forms look very different from the regular Japanese art. See for example the photo on the right of a piece of clothing made from the fibers of some plant. The museum was part of another nice sight, the Botanical Garden of the Hokkaido University. This is quite a large garden of about 13 ha (in the centre of the city!) containing an impressive amount of different trees and plants. Also, it was a nice place to quietly stroll around, away from the busy city.

Next, I visited my first shrine of this trip, the Hokkaido-jingu (see photo). It is located in a large park, Naruyama-koen, and I enjoyed walking around here (I just like parks). Two other ‘famous’ sights in Sapporo are the TV-Tower, a kind of miniature Eiffel Tower, and the Clock Tower. The latter was nothing more than a building with a clock on it. As I said above, Sapporo just does not have the lengthy history that the rest of Japan has, so I guess that one has to be happy with an old house with a clock on it, then. Sapporo is of course also famous for its beer. However, the brewery is located a bit away from the city centre, and I’ve been to enough breweries in my life, so I skipped it.

A funny detail with respect to the house and street numbering; like many Japanese cities, Sapporo’s streets follow a grid pattern (this was copied from China). Then, they took the TV-Tower as the centre point and numbered every housing block and street as the number of blocks east/west and north/south of the tower. This is very convenient, because you can immediately see where you are, without having to memorise many different street names. My ryokan was in ‘West 7 North 4’, if I recall correctly.