Sapporo: beer, parks and life under the snow

Planned from scratch in the nineteenth century on a regular grid inspired by North American cities, Sapporo is now the gateway to Hokkaido and the city that lent its name to one of Japan's most widely exported beers.

The compact center is comfortably explored on foot in a single day.

The Clock Tower, a white wooden structure from 1878 originally an agricultural academy building, remains one of the city's most photographed symbols despite its modest scale compared to the skyscrapers surrounding it.

The Odori Park, a green strip one and a half kilometers long at the city's heart, hosts in winter the massive ice sculptures of the celebrated Sapporo Snow Festival.

The Sapporo Beer Museum, in the red-brick building of the original brewery founded in 1876, traces the arrival of beer-brewing technique in Japan through a Japanese master brewer trained in Germany under government mandate during the Meiji period.

The Susukino district, an entertainment area among the largest in Japan's north, comes alive as the sun sets with ramen shops, karaoke, and neon signs.

A master brewer sent to train in Germany and an urban grid copied from North America tell the same story: Sapporo's pragmatic openness to foreign models from its founding.

Susukino, today entirely Japanese in atmosphere, nevertheless shows that this strategy never erased a distinctly local identity.