Nopporo Forest Park

This guide to Nopporo Forest Park in Sapporo opens after World War Two, when demobilized soldiers with no jobs and often no rice cleared oak and linden trees here without permission and planted crops in the gaps. It follows how officials eventually looked away rather than fight thousands of hungry squatters, and how the open meadows you see today are actually old cornfields and potato patches gone back to grass. Along the way it stops at Mizuho Pond, dug by farmers in 1928 to keep a rice paddy wet through a Hokkaido summer. Look for the birds and insects drawn to the meadows that the deeper forest rarely sees.