The Disappearing Colonial Vestiges of Sapporo

Even at first sight, Sapporo, the capital city of Japan's northernmost Hokkaido prefecture, looks different from your average Japanese city. The center of the city forms a perfect grid, with the streets running north-south or east-west so straight that, if it were not for the streams of cars on them, one can easily see from one end of the city to the other. And these streets, at least two lanes in each direction (if not wider) are designed for easy navigation by cars and other vehicles, rather than facilitate easy crossing by pedestrians just wondering around to get a taste of street life. Shops and restaurants are neatly packed into rectangular buildings on rectangular land plots, rather than spilling onto the streets.

Part of this arrangement is due to the nature of Hokkaido's climate and size. In a city that is lucky to experience a couple of weeks of real summer and harsh, snowy winters, streetlife is simply too cold for most of the year. It makes sense that the city contains numerous underground passageways that connect buildings, enabling people to move about without leaving heated indoors. And with a sparse population and limited transport links outside the center of the city, those coming to Sapporo may much more likely be coming by private cars than trains or buses. Catering to easy driving is logical.

But perhaps just as important to the urban design of Sapporo, beyond climate and size considerations, is the history of the city itself. Manufactured from nothing as the administrative center of Japanese colonization of Hokkaido in the early days of the Meiji Restoration, the city represented a symbol of Japan's modernization through Westernization, based on the belief, prevalent at the time, that a strong nation accepted by the global community can successfully run a settler-colonist administration through introducing a superior (i.e. Western-based) culture to the native population.

As the first Japanese colonial enterprise from which lessons are to be learned for later ones in Okinawa, Korea, Taiwan, Manchuria, and elsewhere, Hokkaido, with its center at Sapporo, is meant to show as much as possible the visible Westernness of the new Japanese state. The neat grid of Sapporo's streets is only one of its many Westernness. On an island surrounded by fertile seas, the local specialty is nonetheless lamb and other meats, dairy products like milk and cheese, as well as imported products like curry, beer, caramel, and whisky. The success of Hokkaido's colonization, it seems, depended on Westernization.

That drive to create from scratch a Westernized colonial culture in the new settler colony of Hokkaido, of course, sat at the odds of the people who actually inhabited its lands. As much as the Meiji imperial government wanted to Westernize Japan as quickly as possible, exposure to the Western lifestyle in the early days of the Meiji era was limited to the well-heeled and connected upper classes. Even as members of this Westernized elite ruled Hokkaido from lavish Western-style mansions, the normal settlers were just poor rural folks attracted by the prospects of cheap land and new opportunities to make a living.

And that is not even mentioning the plight of the Ainu indigenous population who have inhabited the island for centuries before the Japanese decided to show up. In the classic Manifest Destiny-style colonial narrative, Hokkaido was a "terra nullius" that was open for Japanese settlers to occupy. The Ainu, ravaged by diseases and guns brought in by the settlers, suffered massive depopulation as well as cultural and geographical marginalization, to the point that the race itself was not considered one worth distinguishing from the Japanese majority until the injustices are belatedly recognized in recent years. 

That blatant obsession with Western-style colonial culture is finally being rolled back as Japan seeks to rediscover its roots and address injustices. The streets of Sapporo now contain plenty of restaurants that make use of Hokkaido's plentiful seafood, prepared in the classic Japanese ways rather than anything resembling Western style. Nods to Ainu culture are no longer taboo, as Hokkaido opens its first national museum dedicated to Ainu culture, and a new generation of Ainu youths open up shops and restaurants that seek to sell aspects to its traditional culture to the visiting Japanese from elsewhere.

In a way, Sapporo, despite its visible grid-like Western imprint, is slowly being reclaimed as a "regular" Japanese city. Perhaps this is part of a growing trend of not only Japanese but Asian trend toward de-Westernization as Western culture proved itself to be incompetent, at least initially, in handling sudden crises like COVID-19. But the city's Western-style colonial roots, and its often awkward history of reconciling interests of poor settlers, Westernized elites, and hapless Ainu natives, will continue to create a distinctive character that is often culturally homogenous provincial cities in Japan.