Chi-Ka-Ho (Underground Passageway )

This guide to Chi-Ka-Ho, the underground passageway in Sapporo, centers on one ordinary afternoon: February 10, 2015, when a kitchen fire broke out in a restaurant built into Sapporo North Plaza, one of eleven buildings stitched into this climate-controlled corridor that had opened only four years earlier as the city's answer to brutal winters. It follows the steel curtain built into the ceiling near the exit stairs, meant to seal off smoke the instant it appears. Walk the five-hundred-twenty-meter stretch today, past its cafes and flower stalls, and look up near the exit stairs for where that curtain sits above you.