Historical Village of Hokkaido

This guide to the Historical Village of Hokkaido in Sapporo opens with the Kaitakushi, the Meiji agency that spent fourteen million yen building roads, railways and a brewery across Hokkaido in the 1870s under director Kuroda Kiyotaka and adviser William Clark. It follows what happened in summer 1881 when newspapers exposed Kuroda's plan to sell the commission's holdings to a consortium run by an old friend from Satsuma. The fifty-two wooden buildings gathered here, down to the commission's own former Industrial Bureau, were carried piece by piece from across the island.