Hidden in the trees just outside Sapporo is a frontier town surrounded by farms and a fishing village. These 52 buildings are not a functioning town but rather an architectural open-air museum that tells the story of Hokkaido’s pioneering past:…
Asahikawa’s Soldier-Farmers and Ainu
Asahikawa is the second largest city in Hokkaido, but 150 years ago it was an Ainu village along the Ishikari River in a mountain-encircled plain. Later a settlement of farmer-soldiers was established and this little gunto (garrison town) developed into…
Walking Yokohama’s Foreign Quarter
In 1854, Commodore Matthew Perry sat down with representatives of the Tokugawa Shogunate on a flat stretch of coastal land near a sleepy little fishing village called Yokohama. The Treaty of Peace and Amity agreed on at this meeting…