Sakaimachi Street

This guide to Sakaimachi Street in Sapporo opens with fishermen sprinting to shore one March morning in 1897, chasing a color they called kuki, the milky turn of herring-thick water as it came in to spawn. It follows how those frantic seasons built the street's stone trading houses, and how herring fishing also created demand for hand-blown glass floats at what became Kitaichi Glass. The herring runs thinned after 1954, and the glassblowers had to decide what came next. Look for the old stone warehouse, still lit each evening by rows of oil lamps.