Otaru Canal

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.