Maruyama Primeval Forest
Old-growth hillside forest laced with a switchback trail lined by eighty-eight small Kannon statues.
Location
About this audio guide
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.
This audio guide was created using AI.
Similar places
Maruyama
Round-topped hill above the city, its regrown old-growth forest long mislabeled untouched wilderness.
Sapporo Fushimi Inari Shrine
Vermilion torii gates climbing a forested mountainside, framed by deep snow in winter.
Hokkaido Jingu
Forested Shinto shrine founded to guard a frontier settlement, ringed by fourteen hundred cherry trees.
Nopporo Forest Park
Mixed forest of oak and linden hiding meadows that were once farmland cleared by hand after wartime famine.
Hokkaido University Ginkgo Avenue
Golden tunnel of ginkgo trees lining a campus street, survivors of wartime timber cutting.
Hill of the Buddha
Giant stone Buddha buried inside a lavender-ringed hill, its head glimpsed through a circular oculus after a dim, forty-meter tunnel walk.