Day 64: 3 June 2009

LOCATION: SAPPORO
MOOD: STOPPING TO SMELL THE ROSES
LISTENING TO: BEN FOLDS FIVE – STILL FIGHTING IT

THE NOT SO SECRET GARDEN:

It was forecast to rain today, but in a stroke of good luck the heavens limited themselves to being overcast. I was taking no chances however and made sure that I headed back to the Botanical Gardens first thing in the morning in case nature decided to change her mind.

There are a number of paths you can take, but ultimately each of them will take you around the garden.

I'd been to gardens all throughout Japan, but I have to admit that Sapporo's Botanical Gardens made a lasting impact and are well worth the 400 yen entrance fee. The garden spills out across a 14 hectare plot of land in the middle of Sapporo and is carefully divided into a number of distinct regions that showcase different types of plant life. One minute you'll be in the middle of marshland and the next you'll be in the barren, rocky hills of Canada. The ticket to the Botanical Gardens also gets you entry into two museums, one in the middle of the gardens and the other near the main gate.

The whole place was still drenched for the previous day.

There was a greenhouse for all the plants that couldn't take Hokkaido's frigid climate. I won't pretend to know what the sign said; I wouldn't have bothered to read it if it was in English, so there was no chance I going to spend time looking up botany jargon in my Japanese dictionary.

I assume that this arch in the Rose Garden is in high demand for weddings.

This section gave you the chance to experience what it was like to walk through a mangrove, except without the need for boots and leech-repellant.

Other places were a more straight forward affair.

The first is a quaint weatherboard house that's been transformed into a wildlife museum, giving you the fauna to go with the flora that you'd just been enjoying. The building looks quite small from the outside but they managed to pack an impressive amount of exhibits into the space without it feeling cramped. Specimens have been collected from all over Hokkaido and range from birds and small mammals to bears and elephant seals.

Don't let the battered facade fool you.

"What are you doing inside the house?"
"Mmm...this porridge is just right...'

This bird of prey had the whole Mona Lisa "I'm looking at you" thing going on.

There were of course less fortunate creatures.

This cuddly creature, according to the placard, is a wolverine.

This massive elephant seal was actually kind of scary, although made somewhat less so by the fact that it was dead.

The second museum is dedicated to the Ainu people, the indigenous inhabitants of Hokkaido whose culture reflects their proximity to mainland Siberia. The Ainu were ruthlessly suppressed by the ethnic Japanese settlers who pushed up north, and the push to restore Ainu culture and language has been a fairly recent development. The museum is an interesting collection of Ainu artefacts that show how much closer the Ainu were to mainland north Asia than they were to the rest of Japan, even though they maintained steady trade links with Japan before the period of colonisation.

The Ainu Museum. Nice and prominent.

Ainu architecture.

Ainu utensils. It felt very Native American to me.

The clothing though is very Inuit.

IT'S ALL GOOD FUN UNTIL SOMEONE DOES THE SAME THING TO YOU:

After finishing up at the Ainu museum I made my way back to the nearby Governor's mansion to take a look around inside. The two level building is part library, part museum and part propaganda tirade. There are a number of reading rooms dedicated to historical documents from the development of Hokkaido and some interesting exhibits but the most fascinating part is the amount of time and effort dedicated the issue of what Japan terms the 'northern islands', the chain of tiny, mostly resource-less islands north of Japan that are the subject of territorial claims by both Japan and Russia.

Inside the Governor's Mansion. See how the other half lives.

A lot of the rooms in the Mansion have been converted into reading rooms and exhibits, while other rooms have been reserved for government use.

While the rest of the displays are almost completely in Japanese, the laborious case for Japanese ownership of these islands (set out across several meters of signboards) are painstaking translated into English. It was really quite humorous to see the authors play for sympathy over Russian displacement of Japanese settlers following Soviet occupation of the islands in the aftermath of World War II, especially given that I had just come from the Ainu museum. There was also a fair amount of pretty obvious PR posturing with a big exhibit devoted to a 2007 case where a Russian boy from the northen islands was allowed into Japan for emergency medical treatment.

Clearly the most effective way to win people to your way of thinking is with a solid wall of text and no pictures.

Just to prove that there's no enmity with Russia, here's a display case full of Babushka Dolls.

I get the feeling that the key to resolving this dispute may lie somewhere in this cabinet...

As with so much of Japan it seems that there are opposing forces within the society pushing and pulling in different directions, although much of this jostling takes place beneath the calm, settled exterior of Japanese society.

MOVIE SCREENS AND POSTCARD SCENES:

At this point I'd been walking around for several hours so I headed towards the nearby Sapporo Central station for some lunch. As with Kyoto, Sapporo's station is part of a much larger shopping/entertainment complex that includes a hotel, a movie theatre and an observation deck.

After checking out some of the restaurants in the basement I eventually settled on a tasty looking tempura set at a busy joint that was packed with businessmen taking their lunch break. The meal was extremely filling and I struggled to finish the noodles, so after I left the restaurant I didn't really feel like walking around for a while.

Eating was never a big thing for me, but it is nice to have a good meal every once in a while.

I had yet to catch a movie while I was in Japan so I decided to check out the cinemas. Luckily for me I just happened to drop in on Men's Day (Tuesday), which saw the price of tickets slashed from an insane 1800 yen to a more reasonable 1000 yen. The only movie that I could still catch the start of was Angels and Demons so I grabbed my ticket and got ready for some more theorising of the conspiracy variety.

It was interesting watching a film subbed in Japanese, given that I had grown up watching Japanese shows subbed in English. A lot of English shows are actually redubbed in Japanese (Friends was huge in Japan), but given that this was a fairly new release the audience had to make do with subtitles. Comparing the English dialogue to the Japanese translations made me realise how different Japanese is from English and how much nuance is lost in translation. A lot of the dry wit in Tom Hanks' dialogue simply couldn't be translated to Japanese, and while I initially thought this was a big loss to the Japanese audience I realised that there really wasn't an appropriate analogue in Japanese, so in reality they weren't really missing out on much from a Japanese perspective.

Spending an hour and a half in a sedentary position in a darkened room proved to be just the thing I needed to reclaim my vigor and I set off for the nearby JR Tower observation deck. The price was steep but no place offered better views of the city and I had already missed out on going to the Moiwa rope bridge. JR Tower is a great place to get a feel of just how well planned Sapporo is. The Tower is located right next to Sapporo station, smack bang in the middle of the city. As you walk around the deck you can see in all four compass directions and see the neat grid pattern that's been imposed on the city. This made for a refreshing change from the chaos of Tokyo and Osaka.

The observation deck is at the top of the tower. Eagle-eye views indeed.

Because Sapporo is a relatively young city, it is one of the only major cities in Japan to be a planned city. You can see the neat gridlines clearly from up high.

What I call the 'GTA' angle.

These directions painted on the top of sheds in the station car park were a nice touch. Click to enlarge.

FROM BOTANICAL GARDEN TO BEER GARDEN:

Given the previous night's disappointments I was determined to do at least one beer-related thing while I was in Sapporo so I caught the subway to the Sapporo Beer Garden, a restaurant and museum complex built on the site of the original Sapporo brewery. I arrived too late to get the guided tour but just in time for the dinner crowd at the Beer Garden. Well, there are actually a couple of Beer Gardens in the complex but I went in to the first one that advertised the local delicacy Jingus Kaan.

"Hokkaido is Sapporo Beer." Now this is a town I can get used to.

So this is where dreams are made...

"I'd like to buy a vowel, please..."

Pick one; you can't lose. Click to enlarge.

Jingus Kaan is a dish unique to Sapporo, and one that seemingly pays homage to the Mongol roots that many researchers suspect play a substantial part in Korean and Japanese genetics. Essentially the dish is just raw cuts of high grade meat cooked on a hot plate and served a special dipping sauce. The dish is normally also served with beer and vegetables (the vegetables are optional), but I was happy to just have a frothy mug of authentic Sapporo beer and a big plate of meat. After months of scrounging on anorexic steaks and shreds of meat I was happy to get my carnivore on.

I like the German stylings. Very bacchic.

Now THIS is a meal that I can sink my teeth into.

The place was pretty smokey, but it smelled like cooking meat so I was fine with it.

I left the Beer Garden one satisfied customer and spent the night touring around Odori Garden and the underground shopping malls before heading home for a well deserved rest.

Odori Park. The b-boys I mentioned in the previous post were back.

I'm pretty sure the Eiffel Tower doesn't do that at night. Does it? It reminded me of a giant Christmas tree.

Back in Susukino with the crazy neon ferris wheel.