Hokkaido University Ginkgo Avenue

The guide to Hokkaido University's Ginkgo Avenue in Sapporo opens with the sound of axes in nineteen forty-two, when wartime air-raid shelters needed timber and the campus's older cherry and maple trees, planted in the nineteen twenties, were felled to shore up the tunnels underground. It follows why the ginkgos, planted later in the nineteen thirties for their autumn color, were passed over by the saw crews, and what became of the avenue's mix of species afterward. Walk the stretch of North Thirteenth Street where the medical school and its hospital first went up in the nineteen twenties.