Sapporo Waterworks Memorial Museum

The Sapporo Waterworks Memorial Museum guide centers on the summer of 1934, when the city put half a million days of paid labor into digging this hillside, not chiefly to bring residents clean water but to put unemployed families to work during the Great Depression. You'll meet Mayor Hashimoto Masaji, who had spent nearly a decade pushing the project as a hundred-year plan Sapporo could not keep delaying, and hear how the money finally moved as relief work. The guide traces the brick and iron pump hall you're standing in from its 1937 opening, and the tradeoffs baked into who got water first and who did not.