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I lived in Tokyo for a year and Nara for three. Tell me about Sapporo!

• A_D_E_P_T 3y ago
  Sapporo is a big city by any reckoning, at around 2M people. It's larger than Kyoto (1.4M) but slightly smaller than Osaka (2.6M), both of which you're surely very familiar with, from living in Nara. The thing about Sapporo is that it doesn't form part of any regional bloc... Osaka-Kobe-Kyoto-Nara is practically a single megacity, at this point. (And you can arguably include Nagoya.) Tokyo-Chiba-Yokohama is a hyper-megacity. Driving from one end of the other can take many hours. But Sapporo is a rather isolated, standalone city. Hop in a car downtown, and you can find yourself in the woods within 20 minutes. I'm not exaggerating in the slightest. And whereas Tokyo is a city of neighborhoods -- like the way Ikebukuro, Asakusa, and Shinjuku are rather self-contained spaces -- Sapporo has one primary downtown/nightlife district, which is very convenient. It's not inferior to any of Tokyo's neighborhoods, either; in fact, it's considerably larger than most of them. It also has a system of underground pedestrian paths that's one of the wonders of the world, IMO. So it's a big city, surrounded by nature, without sprawl, with clean and well-defined spaces.