Otaru Canal
Curved waterway reclaimed from the bay, lined with stone warehouses and lit by sixty-three gas lamps.
Location
About this audio guide
This guide to Otaru Canal in Sapporo follows nine years of workers reclaiming land from Otaru Bay starting in 1914, and the years after 1923 when barges called hashike ferried herring, coal and rice between anchored ships and the stone warehouses along this bank. It traces the port's boom, the herring's disappearance, and the city's plan by the 1960s to fill the canal in and pave it into a road. Local residents fought that plan for more than a decade, arguing over the same walkway now strung with sixty-three gas lamps.
This audio guide was created using AI.
Similar places
Sakaimachi Street
Preserved merchant street of stone warehouses, glassblowing workshops, and a giant steam-powered clock.
Sōseigawa park
Riverside canal park with lilac-lined paths tracing the waterway that first drew fishmongers to its banks.
Sapporo Shiryokan (Former Sapporo Court of Appeal)
Renaissance-style courthouse of hand-carved volcanic soft stone, its old criminal courtroom preserved inside.
Sapporo Art Park
Former stone quarry reshaped into a hillside sculpture garden with paths threading past dozens of open-air artworks.
Historical Village of Hokkaido
Open-air museum of over fifty relocated pioneer-era buildings from Hokkaido's frontier settlement.