Hokkaido University

This guide to Hokkaido University in Sapporo opens with a puzzle: why a professor who spent only eight months here in 1876 still has his words carved into the campus gates. It follows William Smith Clark, a Civil War veteran and Massachusetts chemistry professor brought in to found the Sapporo Agricultural College, through the frontier classroom he built with two American colleagues and a handful of Japanese students, teaching farming, botany and a restless American optimism. Look for his bust standing quietly on the Central Lawn behind the college he built.