Things to do
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Former Hokkaidō Government Office
Red brick, and the seat of the island's government until the administration outgrew it. Inside now are historical exhibition rooms, libraries, a shop and a tourist office, and entry to the building costs nothing. Flower gardens and a pond stand in front of it and are used as an event space.
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Hokkaidō Shrine
Called the Sapporo Shrine until 1964, and standing inside Maruyama Park. Four kami are enshrined in it, one of them the soul of the Emperor Meiji, along with a number of the men who first surveyed and opened Hokkaido, Mamiya Rinzō among them. The approach is a long walk in under trees.
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Maruyama Park
Modelled on the Kyoto park of the same name and holding a good deal more: the island's main shrine, a zoo, a baseball ground and an athletics stadium all stand inside it. The wooded slope behind rises straight off the grid, which makes this the nearest thing to a mountain walk from the city centre.
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Moerenuma Park
Isamu Noguchi designed this one and did not live to see it open. Work began in 1988 and finished seventeen years later, on ground shaped as a single sculpture: geometric hills, a glass pyramid, a fountain. It took a Good Design Award along the way. Nine kilometres out from the centre, and worth the journey for the shapes alone.
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Mount Moiwa
Five kilometres southwest of the centre, with a ropeway and a road both running up to an observatory near the summit. The city below reads as a lit grid after dark, the street pattern legible from above in a way few Japanese cities are, and that is what the trip is for. A ski slope works the far side in winter.
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Nijō Market
A block southeast of the park, this is where the fish comes ashore into the city. Crab, sea urchin, salmon roe and scallop fill the counters, and the stalls selling them will also put a bowl of it over rice for anyone standing there. It runs on the morning trade and thins after that.
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Odori Park
Its name means large street, and it was drawn into the city plan as one before it ever became a park. A kilometre and a half of it runs east to west, dividing the grid into north and south, which is why an address here is read as a block count off this line. The snow festival fills it in February.
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Ōkurayama Ski Jump Stadium
The large hill from the 1972 Winter Olympics, the first Games held in Asia. A lift carries visitors to the top of the inrun, and the thing to do up there is turn round and look straight down the jump at the city past the outrun. It is still in use as a competition venue.
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Sapporo Beer Museum
The only beer museum in Japan, in a red brick hall raised in 1890 for a sugar company, bought by the brewery in 1903 and worked as a malting house until 1965. The museum itself came two decades later. It is registered as Hokkaido Heritage, and the south wing is a beer garden, where the visit tends to finish.
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Sapporo Clock Tower
Wooden, American in design, and the oldest clock tower in Japan. It survives from the 1870s, when the government was importing foreign engineers to build a province out of nothing, and very few buildings of that moment are left. The clock still runs, still keeps time, and still strikes the hour.
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Sapporo TV Tower
A hundred and forty seven metres of red lattice standing at the east end of the park, put up in 1957, with its deck at ninety. What it looks down is the whole axis of Odori, straight to the far end, and that view is the reason to go up rather than the structure itself.