Despite its easy proximity, brought by the relatively short flying time from Tokyo, an air of remoteness still hangs over Hokkaido. Physically the island is more a last outpost of Siberia than an integral part of Japan. In Hokkaido, little rice grows, scant cherry trees bloom, no rainy season descends, few cockroaches scamper.
And for most of Japanese history, Hokkaido was hardly more than a frontier trading point on the nation's periphery. Surprising it is, then, that a vigorous and lively city like Sapporo should have sprung up at the end of the 19th century as the island's urban hub.
Sapporo is Japan's fifth biggest city, and the northern metropolis carries a breezy, practical, self-assured air. Appropriate for the frontier town it once was, Sapporo is today an uncluttered city, a city of wide-open spaces dating from when the town was first laid out in the 1870s according to a grid plan of streets that still survives today.