Catholic Kitaichijo Church Cathedral Hall

This guide to the Catholic Kitaichijo Church Cathedral Hall in Sapporo starts with a puzzle: why does a plain two-story stone house carry the word cathedral, decades before the church it belongs to actually earned that title? It follows the French missionary priest Henri Lafon, who in 1898 needed a building that could survive Hokkaido's winters after a string of borrowed and temporary chapels had failed his growing congregation, and traces his choice to build with local volcanic stone and a snow-shedding roof. You'll also hear about the larger wooden church raised beside it in 1916. Look for the modest stone hall doing quiet, unglamorous work long before anyone called it a cathedral.