I left Akita at 4:30am, hauled my
luggage on and off trains for seventeen hours, and staggered into
Hokkaido's prefectural capital long after dusk.
As with most things in Hokkaido,
the first word belongs with the Ainu, the indigenous people, whom we
shall return to properly in due course. Sapporo's name comes from sat
poro pet ("dry, large river") in the Ainu language.
Sapporo is one of Japan's
youngest settlements, with dedicated
settlement only beginning in the 1860s. A century and a half later,
it is Japan's fourth most populated city, prosperous and popular, and
renowned for its beer, chocolate biscuits, miso ramen, snow festival,
and hosting of the 1972 Winter Olympics.
 |
| Now is that or is that not a planned city? |
But to understand it – and to
understand Hokkaido – we have to go back further than the birth of
Sapporo. Much further. 40,000 years further, in fact, to the
Pleistocene epoch: far enough to make out its geo-ecological
umbilical cord, which was totally separate from that of Japan's.
Notice anything major that isn't
there now?
