Sapporo Village Memorial Museum

This guide to the Sapporo Village Memorial Museum opens on a Sapporo Village dock in 1880, where a farmer named Nakamura Isokichi loads a hectare's worth of an odd, papery-skinned bulb onto a boat bound for Tokyo, betting there is a market for it somewhere. You'll hear how an American instructor, William Brooks, had brought the onion seed from Massachusetts two years earlier, and how Nakamura's shipment reached the capital only to find no buyers. The guide then follows another farmer, Takei Sozo, who tried a different approach a few years later. Inside the museum, built on the homestead of village founder Otomo Kametaro, the tools and ledgers of that gamble are still on display.