Sapporo

Sapporo is a planned city barely older than its buildings. The name comes from the Ainu, who knew the river crossing here as Sat-poro-pet, understood as a dry or large river, and who lived across the plain long before Japanese settlement. In 1869 the new Meiji government renamed Ezo as Hokkaido and set up a colonisation office, which chose this site on the Ishikari plain for the island's capital and laid it out on a rectangular grid measured north, south, east and west from a firebreak that became Odori Park.

The work was done with foreign advice. American experts were hired to plan farming on the frontier, and the Sapporo Agricultural College, founded in 1876, was led briefly by William S. Clark, remembered for the parting words "Boys, be ambitious". A brewery opened in 1876 using local barley and the cold winters, and became Sapporo Beer. Settlers arrived from across Japan, timber and coal moved through the city, and a village of a few thousand grew into the administrative and commercial centre of the island.

Growth accelerated after the Second World War, and in 1972 Sapporo hosted the Winter Olympics, the first held in Asia, which brought the subway, the Ōkurayama jump and a new scale of infrastructure. The population passed a million by 1970 and has since reached about 1.96 million, concentrating two-fifths of Hokkaido's people in one place while the countryside empties. A later attempt to bring the Winter Games back was set aside, and the extension of the Shinkansen from Hakodate towards the city continues, now due to open in fiscal 2038.

Sapporo thinks of itself as a young, open city, and other Japanese tend to agree: almost every family arrived within the last 150 years, dialect is mild, hierarchy sits a little lighter, and the grid, the wide roads and the low-rise sprawl look more North American than Japanese. The Ainu presence, long suppressed, is acknowledged more openly now, and the name of the city and of many rivers and mountains around it are Ainu words.

Winter organises the culture. The Snow Festival, which began in 1950 when students built a few snow statues in Odori Park, now fills the park with large sculptures each February and is the city's best-known export after its beer. The lilac, the city flower, marks the short spring, the beer gardens fill the park in summer, and lights go up along the same axis at the end of the year.

Beer is a civic identity as much as an industry, and so is ramen: the miso bowl developed in the city's post-war stalls is served everywhere from alley counters to hotel dining rooms. Sport matters — the football club Hokkaido Consadole Sapporo, the Nippon-Ham Fighters baseball team just outside the city, ski jumping on the western hills — and skiing is an ordinary weekend activity rather than a speciality. Susukino gives the city a nightlife out of proportion to its size.

About 1.96 million people live in Sapporo, two-fifths of Hokkaido's population, in ten wards spread across a plain that runs from the mountains to the Ishikari river. It is a city of offices, government, universities, hospitals, retail and tourism rather than heavy industry, with a well-established software and technology cluster and an economy tied to the rest of the island's farming and fishing.

Most residents live in apartment blocks or suburban houses along the subway lines, and commuting is short by Japanese standards. Snow shapes the routine for almost half the year: clearing it from doorways before work, roof-clearing crews, lorries hauling it to designated dumping sites, and a municipal budget where snow removal is a major line. Underground shopping concourses and covered arcades exist because of it.

Sapporo keeps growing slowly while the towns around it shrink, which puts the island's depopulation debate on the city's doorstep — it absorbs young people from rural Hokkaido and then loses many of them to Tokyo. Other current issues are an ageing population, the cost of winter heating and infrastructure, pressure on housing from tourism, and the long wait for the Shinkansen. Summer evenings are spent outdoors, in the park, at a beer garden or up Mount Moiwa, and winter weekends on the ski slopes within an hour of the centre.

Sapporo's dish is miso ramen: a heavy, opaque broth of pork stock and fermented soybean paste with curly yellow noodles, usually topped with sweetcorn, a slice of butter, bean sprouts and minced pork. It was developed in the city's ramen shops in the years after the war and spread across Japan from here; the alley of counters in Susukino known as Ramen Yokocho is the traditional place to try it, though shops all over the city do it as well or better.

Jingisukan, named after Genghis Khan, is the other local institution — mutton or lamb and vegetables grilled on a domed cast-iron pan so the fat runs down, eaten with beer in the halls of the old brewery and in small restaurants everywhere. Soup curry, a thin, spicy broth with whole chicken legs and roasted vegetables over rice, is a Sapporo speciality that has become a Hokkaido staple. Zangi is the local marinated fried chicken.

Beyond that, Sapporo eats the island's produce: kaisendon, bowls of rice covered with sea urchin, salmon roe, scallops and crab, at Nijo Market and the stalls beside the wholesale market; ishikari nabe, a salmon and vegetable hotpot named after the river; potatoes with butter, sweetcorn grilled in the park, dairy soft serve and cheese; and Yubari melons as luxury gifts. Sapporo Beer and Nikka whisky, distilled at nearby Yoichi, are the drinks, and Shiroi Koibito biscuits the standard souvenir.