Takino Suzuran Hillside Park

This guide to Takino Suzuran Hillside Park in Sapporo traces what this hillside was before it became parkland: a water-powered lumber mill running from eighteen seventy-nine, then decades of settlers in the nineteen fifties and sixties trying and failing to farm its stubborn soil and brutal winters. You'll hear how the last building on site, an elementary school, closed in nineteen seventy-one, before national-park construction began in nineteen seventy-nine. Listen for how the guide frames the ground beneath today's grill gardens as failed farmland first.