History
Sapporo barely existed before the Meiji government decided it needed to. In 1868, the new government moved to formally settle and develop Hokkaido — until then home mostly to the indigenous Ainu people and a scattering of Japanese trading posts — partly to secure the northern frontier against Russian expansion. Sapporo was chosen as the new Hokkaido Development Commission’s headquarters in 1869 and laid out from scratch on a wide, regular grid, a striking departure from the organic street plans of Japan’s older cities.
An American-designed university, an Asian first, a beer
The Meiji government leaned heavily on foreign advisors to develop Hokkaido’s unfamiliar northern climate and terrain, and Sapporo’s most enduring institutional legacy came from one of them: Massachusetts agricultural scientist William S. Clark, who spent less than a year in 1876 setting up what became Hokkaido University, but whose farewell line to his students — “Boys, be ambitious” — is still widely quoted in Japan today. That same year, the government opened the Kaitakushi Brewery, the direct ancestor of Sapporo Beer, using German brewing techniques adapted to Hokkaido’s cold climate and barley.
Sapporo’s clearest moment on the world stage came in 1972, when it hosted the Winter Olympics — the first Winter Games held anywhere in Asia. The Games left the city with much of its modern transit infrastructure, including its subway system, and cemented Sapporo’s identity as a winter-sports and winter-festival city, an identity the Sapporo Snow Festival (first held in 1950, well before the Olympics) had already begun building.
Sapporo and the rest of Hokkaido
As Hokkaido’s prefectural capital, Sapporo functions as the administrative, economic, and transit hub for an island more than twice the size of Kyushu — most travelers heading anywhere else in Hokkaido pass through New Chitose Airport and Sapporo Station first. The city’s rapid postwar growth (it didn’t pass a million residents until 1970) has made it something of an outlier within Hokkaido, whose smaller towns have mostly been shrinking for decades.
Getting there and getting around
New Chitose Airport, about 40 minutes south of the city center by rapid train, is Hokkaido’s main air gateway and well connected to international routes across East Asia. Sapporo itself has a small subway network plus streetcars and buses; the city center’s grid layout makes it unusually easy to navigate on foot compared with most Japanese cities.
