Sapporo

A ribbon of park 1.5 kilometres east to west, twenty minutes end to end on foot. Snow sculptures fill it for a week in early February; the same blocks turn into beer gardens in summer.

A two-storey wooden building wedged between office blocks, small enough that the city leans into the joke. Inside is a settlement-era museum. A photo platform sits on the pavement across the road.

Open from seven in the morning until six at night. Many stalls keep a three-seat counter at the back, turning what you pick into a rice bowl on the spot. The uni and roe change origin by season.

A ropeway takes you halfway and a small cable car finishes the climb. The last run is around ten at night; winter wind or maintenance closes it often enough that you check before setting off.

A biscuit factory with a mock-European garden attached, the line running behind glass. The workshop that prints your own photo onto a biscuit tin takes advance booking. Figures come out of the clock tower on the hour.

It backs onto Maruyama Park, where plum and cherry bloom together in early May. Squirrels live in the grounds and show up early. The tea house by the path grills mochi to order and sells them one at a time.

The red-brick brewery is itself the museum, free to enter, with tasting charged by the glass. Kaitakushi, the beer poured here, never leaves the site. Next door, the mutton hall needs a booking.

A landfill site that Isamu Noguchi redesigned as one continuous sculpture. It is big enough that you rent a bicycle to see it. Outside the glass pyramid, most of it is snowfield in winter.

The neon block, joined to Odori by an underground passage so you can walk it in winter without going outside. Ramen Yokocho packs a dozen shops into one lane, half of them open until dawn.

A 380-metre avenue of ginkgo runs east to west along Kita 13-jo, turning yellow from late October into early November. The campus is open and free. For that one weekend cars are stopped so you can walk down the middle.

A gorge-side onsen town; the bus from Sapporo Station takes about an hour. Legend puts kappa in the river, so kappa statues stand all over town. When the gorge turns colour in October, the red Futami suspension bridge gives the best view down.

The ski jump of the 1972 Sapporo Winter Olympics; a chairlift climbs to the lookout on top. Standing beside the start gate, the slope looks like a wall. Straight ahead the city runs down to Odori Park.

A hill where a full-length statue of Dr Clark, of Boys, be ambitious fame, points out over the city. The one at Hokkaido University is only a bust, so the raised arm exists here alone. In summer sheep graze the pasture on the slope.

A shopping street trading since 1873, its roofed blocks running about 900m through seven chome. Drugstores, souvenir shops and old coffee houses mix. In snow it keeps you dry between Odori and Susukino.

The polar bear house has an underwater tunnel where the bears paddle overhead. A Hokkaido zone shows the island's own animals, brown bears and Ezo deer among them. It stays open through winter, when the animals play in the snow.

A flooded volcanic caldera 363m deep, Japan's second-deepest lake. The water is so clear it glows a colour called Shikotsu blue. Driving south from Sapporo takes some 90 minutes; come winter, lake water is sprayed onto frames to build an ice festival.

Over 50 buildings from the Meiji to early Showa years, moved in from across Hokkaido to make an outdoor museum. You can walk into a herring fishermen's bunkhouse and a country post office. A horse-drawn tram runs in summer, a horse sleigh in winter.