Hokkaido III: Sapporo and Otaru

We left Kussharo and ambled back with the same train we came. In Kushiro we boarded the JR express to Sapporo, four hours away.

The line between Kushiro and Sapporo follows the sea coast, then cuts inland through the central mountains. It makes for some good scenery along the way. Here's the north pacific on the southern coast of Hokkaido.

Sapporo station is big and busy. You have plenty of souvenir shops with stuff from all over Hokkaido, and on the top floor food court of the adjoining mall there's a ramen area with several popular Hokkaido ramen chains. Plan for plenty of waiting time; it's been crowded every time I've gone there.

We stayed two nights in Sapporo, and spent the better part of one day in nearby Otaru on the coast north of Sapporo itself. Sapporo is a fairly large city - fifth largest in Japan I believe - and it feels like it. The streets are bustling (no mean feat when they're covered in ice and snow) and the city feels as alive in dead of winter as it did on my business trip last summer.

Despite the cold and the snow - or because of it - the city is very pleasant to walk around, even at night. All the streets are well-lit and plowed and the sidewalks are generally snow-free. The white snow lits up the ground and makes the city feel warmer and brighter than places like Osaka further south.

Sapporo Beer Garden.

Sapporo is the hometown of Sapporo Beer, and the old brewery is converted to a "Djingis Khan" restaurant - Japanese lamb barbecue, with no connection to Mongolia other than the catchy name; café, party space and souvenir shop. Yes, it's touristy. Yes, it's frequented by package-tour groups coming in by the bus load. And yes, I'm sure there's better Djingis Khan places to be had elsewhere in the city. But it is fun, and it is good, and it is inexpensive. And let's face it, things become popular and touristy precisely because they offer something that many people appreciate.

You can get an all-you-can-eat barbecue course, but I would recommend ordering stuff off the menu instead. Unless you're a Sumo wrestler it won't be any more expensive, and you can get a wider variety of stuff to grill, such as wonderful meaty sausages, or these juicy lamb chops and delicious scallops.

If you like beer, I do recommend the all-you-can drink option however. They have four or five beers on offer, including Yebisu Black, my favourite Japanese dark beer, and it'll be cheaper if you drink three beers or more. Which you can easily do, as it seems the beer is a bit lower in alcohol than the store-bought stuff.

When I asked if it was, the waitress said that "it comes straight from the restaurant brewery next door". Which isn't really a "no", of course. They may well brew it somewhat weaker for the restaurant; if they do, then good. Light beers especially tend to taste better with a little less alcohol, and you can enjoy more beer without getting drunk.

Susukino is an entertainment district toward the south. We ate in a bustling izakaya there before returning to our hotel the last night. The place was packed full, so we got counter seats right in front of the fish cooks; way more fun than sitting at a table.

As we returned from Susukino the temperature rose to just around freezing point and there was snow in the air. The result is a diffuse mist that bathes the world in a faint silvery shimmering light.

Otaru

Otaru is a smaller town on the coast north of Sapporo. It's the closest port to Sapporo, so it long served as a gateway to the island. Large trading houses and banks used to have offices here, often in imposing stone buildings. The companies and banks have mostly disappeared, but fortunately - and rarely, for Japan - the city has preserved the old buildings, and the town has become a popular sightseeing destination.

Otaru is a quick train ride from Sapporo so it's easy to go there just over the afternoon. The station is still a charming old-style wooden construction, decorated with glass lanterns from Otaru Glass.

The day was grey and overcast, with occasional flurries of snow. This canal-side painter persevered in the cold, even when an unwanted critic flew in for a closer look.

This harbour-side canal is perhaps the most famous of the city views. The old warehouses are all converted to restaurants and shops. One of them houses Otaru Beer brewery, with a beer hall and tours of the brewery itself. Their "Dunkel" dark beer is so-so but the Pilsner is really good and the Weissbier is among the best I have tried. If you don't want to carry bottles around the beer is available - though more expensive - at the airport as well.

Otaru Glass is a large glass maker in the city, and another popular destination. Their signature product seems to be oil lanterns in glass, and they have a café lit entirely by oil lamps and nothing else. The place is very warm from all the oil lamps and the atmosphere is still, almost church-like, even when full of guests. It's a great place to thaw out in winter, with a mug of tea or hot cocoa and perhaps a cake or two.

Before leaving Sapporo and Hokkaido we stopped by Satosuisan, a well-known fishmonger. They have a large selection of fish and seafood, both fresh and cooked. If there's any reason to be envious of people living here, this is it. We got smoked and fresh salmon, pate, vinegared squid and other things too. All fresh, high quality and much cheaper than in Osaka.

There's more pictures in the Sapporo set and the Otaru set on Flickr.

Last meal before leaving Hokkaido. "Taj Mahal" Indian restaurant in Sapporo, a couple of blocks south of the station, has a cheesy interior but the food is good and the atmosphere is warm and friendly. It's the kind of place I'd be happy to go whenever I'm in the neighbourhood.

Train to the New Chitose airport, and onwards home.

Sapporo

Sapporo manhole cover
with the old clocktower

I was in Sapporo in Hokkaido last weekend on a quick work-related trip. It's Japan's fifth largest city with about 1.9 million inhabitants. It's a fairly new city, and it shows: all the streets are laid out in a neat north-south and east-west pattern, with addresses indexed by the number of streets from the central block with the old clock tower.

As it happened, the meeting and travel schedule left us with part of a day to wander around the city on our own. I'd been there only once before, for a couple of days in winter. It was before I'd moved to Japan; I understood not a word of Japanese and had not a clue about anything related to Japanese society. Combine it with some severe jetlag and my impressions at the time were positive but very fragmentary and confused.

Yes, Sapporo is the kind of city that runs tram lines on the street. Didn't have time to use them, unfortunately.

 
This time it was high summer, no jetlag and I have a better handle on life in this country. To take one example: When we were there about seven years ago we went looking for a place to eat outside our hotel. We failed to find anything until we got to the station and its underground arcade. I happened to pass by the same hotel this time and saw immediately that there are half a dozen restaurants right across the street. Of course, they didn't have big windows or pictures of food, and the signs did not say "restaurant" in English so we completely missed them at the time.

Colorful street

The city is pleasant. Really pleasant; it's seems to be the most comfortable city I've ever visited. The summer climate is near perfect - still hot, but without any of the muggy, clingy humidity of Osaka and other southern cities. From what I remember of my last visit, the winters are also very pleasant, with lots of snow but not very cold.

The whole city layout feels open and clear, with wide, straight streets, broad sidewalks everywhere and no hills or other obstacles to getting around. There's hardly a street without a row of leafy trees to shade you, and lots of parks and green areas wherever you go.

 

Sapporo is ancestral home to Sapporo beer, and there's both a beer museum and famous Beer Garden that we had no time to visit. But during the high summer in August, a lot of beer companies set up temporary beer gardens in the Odori park; you can find Sapporo, Kirin, Asahi and even foreign beer companies here, with beer (of course) and light foods such as sausages, yakiniku and so on.

It's a large city so everything you'd expect seems to be here, from department stores and large bookstores to small specialists and oddball services. It's a popular tourist destination so much of the business is service oriented. The summer is a major tourist season, and the city center was bustling with people. The city is otherwise famous for it's winter festival, with a large snow-sculpture competition, and the city is popular with skiers.

Sunday featured an amateur music festival along the avenue going south from the train station. They closed off the street for the entire afternoon (I think; I was busy the rest of the day), and amateur bands set up and played. Here's one band doing a decent cover of Guns N' Roses Welcome to the Jungle" (a female vocalist works really well for that song).

If this sounds like I'm some gushing fanboy at least I'm not alone. The population of Sapporo has been increasing even the last couple of years, in the face of the economic recession and even as the population of Hokkaido is dropping. Sapporo itself now houses about a third of the inhabitants of the island. Apparently this causes a fair amount of friction between Sapporo and the rest of Hokkaido; I guess that's more or less unavoidable.

Even the graffiti manages to be interesting rather than ugly. I have no clue whatsoever what this means.