For most of the long train trip from Hakodate to Sapporo, the Super Hokuto express followed the shore of Uchiura Bay on the Pacific Ocean, which provided for some excellent scenery, and we passed the large industrial and port city of Muroran, headquarters of Japan Steel Works.
At Sapporo Station, we caught a taxi to the Daiwa Roynet Hotel in the Susukino in the south-eastern part of the CBD. Susukino is the centre of bar, karaoke and night club activity in Sapporo - we think our travel advisor, Alan Gibson, may have been trying to expose us to new experiences? Susukino has a reputation for being full of loud and carousing drunks at night. We could hear this through the open window of our hotel room, but we didn't think it was exceptional - after all, we used to live in Surry Hills, Sydney where drunkeness is an oft-practiced art form.
Night street scene in Susukino, our hotel at the far left.
Our bedroom clock was the Sapporo landmark TV tower.
Sapporo is a big city, the fifth largest in Japan, with a population around two million, and its location on a big flat plain has enabled a near-perfect rectangular grid street layout. The city has adopted the practice of numbering north or south and east or west of a ground zero location which happens to be the landmark TV tower at the eastern end of Odori Park and on the perfectly north-south Soseigawa-dori street and Sosei river-canal. (The tower is not much of a landmark now, it's been swamped by taller skyscrapers). Sapporo has appled this American-style numbering system to blocks rather than streets which is confusing at first - each intersection is the meeting point of four adjacent blocks.
Our visit here was the one timing imperative of this whole Japan trip. We were here for the 69th annual Sapporo Snow Festival whose main sites run from 05-12 February. This world famous ice festival draws two million overseas visitors, and we bumbed into them all. It was very crowded and very noticeable were the numbers of Korean and Chinese attendees. We've also seen more westerners here than anywhere else of this trip. The Snow Festival appears to be an annual project of the Japan Ground Self-Defence Force which has its work cut out for it in warm winters with little ice and snow!
Very nice poster for the 2018 Sapporo Snow Festival.
We thought of the Sapporo Snow Festival as a massive "ice sculpture" event. It is that, but it's also highly commercial (the main installations are blatantly sponsored by some business or other), and there is also an artificial ski slope, a skating rink, a children's fun park (we didn't go there), and live entertainment and places for "citizen sculptures" to be exhibited. Oh, and hundreds of souvenir and food stalls!
The main festival site is the twelve block long, one block wide east-west Odori Park which divides the city into north and south. This is where the main commercial installations are, and the overcrowding. The festival employs hundreds of "police" to manage crowd movements, a pain for photographers who want a vantage point, and stop them from getting run over at the many north-south roads which intersect the park. We were a little disappointed with this part of the festival - mere ice sculpting is not enough, and huge installations are invariably just a platform for a projected light display accompanied by loud music (think Vivid in Sydney, only a lot colder).
Sculpture sponsored by Yamaha responds in colour to the musician.
Impressive racehorse sculpture.
Some sculpture are really just screens for a projected light show with loud music. This one is "Arctic Armageddon".
Well rugged up performer in front of Taiwan's former Taichung Station.
Sweden celebrates 150yr of diplomatic relations with Japan this year, hence Stockholm Cathedral.
Truly impressive, this huge ice sculpture of the Yakushiji Temple in Nara.
Selfies are the major activity in Sapporo.
Mina got the job of live performances on the ice festival's stages.
Sculpture in support of children in developing countries.
Boarder seems to be going nowhere (but landed safely) at the festival jump hill in front a huge crowd.
The subsidiary site, we think much more appealing because some true art was on display and it was much less crowded, was in Susukino on a closed three block section of the major north-south street running between West 3 and West 4 blocks, and over the top of the Namboku Subway Line. Here we could see some great ice art, illuminated yes, but without the razzle-dazzle of a sound and light display.
"Supple Woman" sculpture in the Susukino festival site.
Almost transparent, these goldfish looked really good.
An icy fish on an icy night!
Ice sculptor, sponsored by Stihl, in action.
Air Asia sponsored this aeroplane display.
Kids had a great time on this ice slide.
We hope to see some red crested white cranes in eastern Hokkaido.
Forty or so ice blocks make up the ice aquarium, each with some varieties of local seafood.
We were in Sapporo for four nights, so had a lot of time to walk around, look in the shops, find places to eat, and generally chill out. The weather was mostly snowy, with occasional periods of fineness and even sunshine. The temperature was always about -4C, and luckily there was unsually not much wind. So the walking was quite pleasant, although slippery in some places. Like elsewhere, businesses seem to bear responsibility for their footpaths, and their attention to that task is quite varied. Some are immaculate (helped by sub-surface heating), others are 200mm thick with ice compressed with footprints and treated with grit (freely available from roadside dispensers). Intersections can be hairy, but they are mostly OK.
We had the most delicious "cheap and cheerful" meal here, but sitting on the floor with our shoes off was hard on our old backs.
Walking around, you discover that this is a big modern city with entertainment areas (Susokino), and precincts for dining, business, government and residential. There are massive underground shopping precincts - you can follow a subway line through an underground shopping mall - and there are undercover shopping malls. And as usual, it's the less frequented areas which are the most interesting (but the footpaths become trickier).
Our most reliable source of espresso caffeine on this trip!
The garden of the former Hokkaido Government Office.
Artistic streetlamps decorate this inner-city park
Lightbulbs in a igloo play sounds of home when you turn them on.
Street art is impressive in all the cities we've been to.
In these walks, night and day, we came across the Sapporo Clock Tower, which must be the oldest building in the city. Surrounded by much larger buildings, its a two or three story wooden structure first built in 1878 as a military drill hall, an embujo, but the architecture is "American midwest". The clock was added in 1881. This building, totally out of place in modern Sapporo, is now a museum.
Must be Sapporo's oldest building, the Clock Tower.
Sapporo has a single tram route (shiden) in operation, with a mix of old and new tramcars running around a big city loop in both directions around the west half of the city and takes visitors to near the Mount Moiwa ropeway and cable car rides. The original street-car system started in 1909 as the "Stone Horsecar Railway", and was elecrified in 1918. The city once had more routes, but subways finished them off. We found it interesting that the trams run alongside the kerbs unlike most which follow the centres of the roads. Think of the advantages of this system - much better access to tram-stops for patrons, no need for hook turns at intersections (eh, Melbourne?), power infrastructure can integrate with light poles etc.
Trams on Sapporo's big loop circular line.
As for city history, Sapporo was the home of Ainu people since before recorded history. In 1868 the new Meiji government, which ended the Edo period, set out to develop the area, thinking that the Ishikari Plain was a better spot than Hakodate for the local capital. In the late 1800's, the Japanese, opening up to the world, employed American expertise for farming and food production. Sapporo was selected for the 1940 Winter Olympics, but WW2 delayed that until 1972. The city was extenively bombed during the war, and rebuilt afterwards. The first Sapporo Snow Festival was held in 1950.
Steaks to fortify us for two weeks in "outback" Hokkaido.
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