Sapporo is a different Japan. There are no ancient temples or narrow wooden alleys here: the capital of Hokkaido is a young city of wide streets laid out on a grid, planned almost from scratch just over a century and a half ago, with an open, orderly feel that surprises anyone arriving from the crowded south of the country. It is the gateway to the great northern island, a frontier land of wild nature, epic winters and a culture of its own, shaped by settlers who set out to tame a rugged territory.
Its worldwide fame comes above all from snow and food. Every February, the Snow Festival fills Odori Park with colossal ice sculptures that draw millions of visitors, and close by is Niseko, with some of the best powder snow on the planet. At the table, Sapporo means hearty, comforting pleasures: hot, rich miso ramen, perfect for the cold; Sapporo beer, the oldest in Japan; grilled lamb (jingisukan); and ultra-fresh seafood from the northern seas, with crab, sea urchin and salmon.
This guide explores Sapporo with a practical, warm eye: what to see in the city, how to get around on its handy subway and underground passages, how to experience the Snow Festival, where to eat the best ramen and seafood, and how to use Sapporo as a base to discover Hokkaido's onsen, lakes and mountains. Sapporo doesn't try to dazzle you with antiquity; it wins you over with its warmth, its nature and its incredible food at the northern edge of Japan.
Sapporo is a young city with an ancient past. For millennia the island of Hokkaido was the land of the Ainu, Japan's indigenous people, with their own language, religion and way of life; the very name 'Sapporo' comes from an Ainu place name. Until the 19th century, the Japanese government barely controlled the island, then called Ezo. Everything changed after the Meiji Restoration of 1868: the new government, fearful of Russian expansion and hungry for resources, decided to colonise and develop Hokkaido, and in 1869 it created a Development Commission (Kaitakushi) that chose the site of Sapporo to build the island's administrative capital, planned on a grid with the help of foreign advisers, many of them American. An agricultural college (today Hokkaido University) was founded, and crops, livestock and even Western-style beer were introduced. In a few decades, an almost empty plain became a modern city. In 1972, Sapporo hosted the Winter Olympic Games, the first held in Asia, which put it on the world map. Colonisation, however, came at an enormous cost to the Ainu, whose culture was suppressed for generations and is now being revived. The full story is on our history page.
Read the full history ↓The far ends of Japan: Hokkaido, ancestral land of the Ainu colonised in the 19th century, and Okinawa, the former Ryukyu Kingdom and scene of the bloodiest battle of 1945.
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Origins, formation and what the sources say.
Long before a single street of Sapporo existed, the large northern island we now call Hokkaido was home to a people whose culture was completely different from that of the rest of Japan: the Ainu. With their own features, language, religion and customs, the Ainu had lived for millennia on Hokkaido, the Kuril Islands and Sakhalin, living off hunting, fishing (salmon above all) and gathering. They lived in deep connection with nature, which they believed was inhabited by spirits (kamuy). The bear in particular held a central place in their worldview and rituals.
The very name 'Sapporo' bears witness to that presence. It comes from an Ainu expression usually interpreted as 'large dry river' or 'river that runs through a plain', referring to the local riverbeds. In fact, many of Hokkaido's place names have Ainu origins, a linguistic map of the island's former inhabitants that survives beneath today's Japanese names.
For centuries, central Japan treated the island, which it called Ezo, as a distant frontier. There were trading contacts, sometimes tense, through the Matsumae feudal domain at the island's southern tip, but most of the territory stayed outside Japanese control and in Ainu hands. That situation, unchanged for generations, broke down suddenly in the 19th century, when the new, modern Japan set its sights on the north.
The transformation of Hokkaido and the birth of Sapporo were a direct result of the Meiji Restoration of 1868, the revolution that modernised Japan at breakneck speed. The new government looked north with unease for two reasons. It feared the expansion of the Russian Empire, which was advancing across East Asia and could lay claim to the island, and it wanted the natural resources of that vast, little-exploited territory: farmland, forests, mines and fisheries. Its answer was a historic decision to colonise and develop Hokkaido in a planned, accelerated way.
In 1869 the territory was officially renamed Hokkaido ('northern sea circuit'), and a Development Commission, the Kaitakushi, was set up to organise the colonisation. The commission chose a spot on the great Ishikari plain to build the island's administrative capital: Sapporo. The city was designed from scratch on paper, with a regular grid of wide streets aligned to the cardinal points and Odori Park as its central axis. This rational, modern planning stood in contrast to the organic growth of Japan's old cities.
To develop that frontier land, the Japanese government did something unusual: it hired dozens of foreign advisers, many of them American, who had experience settling cold-climate territories such as the Midwest and New England. They introduced Western farming techniques, crops and livestock, urban layouts and American-style timber and brick architecture (hence buildings like the Clock Tower and the red-brick government office building). They even brought in beer brewing, which took root so well that Sapporo Beer, founded in 1876, is now the oldest beer brand in Japan. Within a few decades, a nearly empty plain had become a modern city and the engine of the new Hokkaido.
The rapid development of Hokkaido and the growth of Sapporo had a painful flip side: the marginalisation and repression of the Ainu people, whose ancestral land was occupied and transformed without their consent. As Japanese settlers arrived and land was handed out for farming, the Ainu were pushed out of their hunting and fishing grounds, and their traditional way of life became impossible.
The new state also imposed a policy of forced assimilation. Ainu cultural practices such as women's traditional tattoos, certain rites and hunting in its ancestral forms were banned or discouraged, and the Japanese language and Japanese names were imposed. A law from the late 19th century, euphemistically called the Aborigines 'Protection' Act, placed the Ainu firmly under state guardianship and sped up the loss of their language and traditions. It treated them as a people to be 'civilised' rather than a culture to be respected. For generations, being Ainu meant facing discrimination, and many people hid their origins.
This process drained the Ainu's cultural heritage enormously and came close to wiping out their language. Only in recent decades has there been a shift. In 1997 a law promoting Ainu culture was passed, in 2008 the Japanese Parliament formally recognised the Ainu as an indigenous people, and in 2019 a new law strengthened that recognition. In 2020 Upopoy, the National Ainu Museum and Park, opened in Shiraoi, near Sapporo. It stands as a symbol of the effort to recover and honour a culture that the colonisation which gave birth to Sapporo itself had nearly destroyed. Telling Sapporo's story without this chapter would be telling only half of it.
Throughout the 20th century, Sapporo grew steadily into a major metropolis and the undisputed economic, administrative and cultural centre of Hokkaido. Its population multiplied, railways were laid, industry and trade developed, and the 19th-century planned city filled up with avenues, buildings and neighbourhoods. Far from being an obstacle, winter became part of its identity. In 1950 a group of students built a few snow statues in Odori Park, and that bright idea gave rise to the Snow Festival, which over the years grew into one of the biggest winter events in the world.
The big leap onto the international stage came in 1972, when Sapporo hosted the Winter Olympic Games, the first held in Asia. For the city and for all of Japan it was a turning point. It led to the building of the subway, sports facilities and transport and communications infrastructure, sped up urban modernisation and showed the world a dynamic, capable Sapporo, following in the footsteps of the 1964 Tokyo Summer Games. Those Olympics cemented the winter calling of the city and of Hokkaido as a destination for snow and sport.
Since then, Sapporo has established itself as one of Japan's great cities and as the gateway to Hokkaido's spectacular nature, which is increasingly popular with travellers from around the world. Nearby Niseko has become famous for having some of the best powder snow on the planet, drawing international skiers, and the island's food and nature tourism keeps growing.
Today's Sapporo is a city of almost 1.9 million people, the fifth largest in Japan and one of the most pleasant and liveable in the country. Its orderly grid layout, wide streets, generous green spaces and underground passages that let you get around without going out into the cold make it a comfortable, spacious city, very different from the overwhelming density of other big Japanese cities. It's a young city, with no ancient temples or castles, but it has a personality of its own, shaped by its frontier history, its extreme climate and its mix of influences.
Sapporo shines in two areas that have made it famous in Japan and abroad. One is winter. Every February the Snow Festival draws millions of visitors to its colossal ice sculptures, and the city is the base for reaching some of the world's best ski resorts. The other is food. The miso ramen born here, the unbeatable seafood from Hokkaido's seas, lamb jingisukan, soup curry, Sapporo beer and the island's dairy products and sweets make the city a place of pilgrimage for anyone who loves good food.
Above all, Sapporo is the key to Hokkaido, the great island of volcanoes, lakes, flower fields, steaming onsen, forests and wildlife that represents Japan's most natural and wild side. With growing awareness, the city is also taking on the task of honouring the memory of the Ainu people, whose land it occupies and whose name it carries. Visiting Sapporo is a glimpse of a different Japan: newer, more open, colder and more closely tied to nature. A city planned a century and a half ago has become one of the country's best-loved, and beneath every name and every street, the echo of the old land of the Ainu still beats.
