Asahiyama Memorial Park

This guide to Asahiyama Memorial Park in Sapporo begins with two lopsided numbers: how many rode a streetcar up this hillside in its opening year of 1929, and how few rode it just four years later. It follows the businessman Takakura Yasujiro, who piped hot spring water more than twenty-five kilometers from Jozankei to build a bathhouse resort here in the 1920s, and the tramline built to carry bathers up the slope. You'll hear about the 1930 fire and the depression that followed it. Stand at the railing and look over the same view those bathers once paid for.