Maruyama Primeval Forest

This guide to Maruyama Primeval Forest tells how settler Manpei Ueda and his brother Zenshichi, migrants from Shikoku, cut a trail up this modest hill above Sapporo in 1914 so their new neighbors could walk a miniature version of a sacred eighty-eight-temple pilgrimage from back home. You'll hear how pairs of small stone Kannon statues came to line the switchback path, and how a route built for practical devotion caught on with the whole city, not just the faithful. It also traces an irony in how this same patch of old-growth oak, katsura and magnolia was protected as untouched woodland only a few years after axes first opened it up.