Sapporo

'Boys, be ambitious!' William S. Clark shouted as he rode away from the agricultural college he had founded in a city that did not exist twenty years earlier. That 1877 farewell—still inscribed on public buildings across Hokkaido—captures the essential strangeness of Sapporo: a Japanese city designed by Americans, built on land taken from the Ainu people, using agricultural techniques imported from Massachusetts to colonize an island that Japan itself had only formally annexed in 1869. Sapporo is the Ainu word for 'big, dry river,' and the city's grid layout was drawn not by Japanese planners but by Horace Capron, formerly US Secretary of Agriculture under Ulysses Grant, hired specifically because of his experience with American frontier settlement—including the forced removal of Native Americans.

The Meiji government treated Hokkaido as Japan's own American West. Between 1871 and 1884, seventy-six foreign advisors—forty-six of them American—were brought to develop the island. Clark arrived in 1876 to establish Sapporo Agricultural College (now Hokkaido University), importing not just farming techniques but American Protestant Christianity and the philosophy of manifest destiny. The Ainu, who had inhabited the island for millennia with spiritual beliefs centered on kamuy (deities in animals and natural phenomena), were dispossessed of their land and forced to assimilate. Japan did not formally recognize them as an indigenous people until 2019, 150 years after annexation.

Sapporo's early experiments produced unexpected successes. The beer brewery that American advisor David Penhallow helped establish became Sapporo Breweries—still one of Japan's leading beer brands, founded in 1876 and now a multinational corporation. The agricultural college evolved into a research university. The planned 1940 Winter Olympics were cancelled by war, but Sapporo hosted the 1972 Games—the first Winter Olympics in Asia—building subway infrastructure and ski jump facilities that remain in use. After World War II, Sapporo replaced the port city of Otaru as Hokkaido's commercial hub, and its population surpassed one million by 1970.

Sapporo is now home to 1.9 million residents, making it Japan's fifth-largest city and the largest north of Tokyo. The city generates roughly 60% of Hokkaido's economic output through services, tourism, food processing, and IT. In 2023, Rapidus Corporation announced a ¥5 trillion semiconductor fabrication plant in nearby Chitose—Hokkaido's largest-ever business investment—positioning the region as part of Japan's strategy to rebuild domestic chip manufacturing capacity. The city's bid for the 2030 Winter Olympics failed, but the semiconductor corridor may prove more transformative than any sporting event. Sapporo's trajectory mirrors its founding logic: a planned settlement that succeeds by importing what it lacks—first American agronomists, then Olympic infrastructure, now cutting-edge fabrication technology.