Hokkaido Jingu

This guide to Hokkaido Jingu in Sapporo opens in the eighteen sixties, when officials of the Kaitakushi, Japan's frontier development agency, decided the fledgling settlement of Sapporo needed a spiritual anchor before it had streets. It follows Emperor Meiji's eighteen sixty-nine order to carry three pioneer deities north from Tokyo, and the ceremony that seated them on this rise above the frontier town in eighteen seventy-one under the name Sapporo Shrine. Walk the approach lined with roughly fourteen hundred cherry trees, planted across ground the Kaitakushi once logged as raw wilderness, and come in late April to see it turn pink and white.