Sapporo on Foot: Beer Museum, Sapporo Factory & Odori Park
Travel · Published 7/3/2024 ·
삿포로 여행 콘텐츠네요. 자연스러운 영어로 옮겨드리겠습니다.
If you spend any time wandering around Sapporo, two things keep popping up: Odori Park and the Sapporo TV Tower. The tower doubles as a Panasonic clock tower, though I never quite figured out what else it’s used for. It looks a bit like the Eiffel Tower, and up close it’s bigger than you’d expect. I only found this out later, but apparently there’s a huge underground shopping arcade beneath Odori Park ^^
It was a little chilly, and there was a steady wind carrying the odd raindrop. Maybe it was the season finally turning — it had been cold up until then…
I spotted this building while heading out to do a bit of shopping. Hokkaido is apparently a planned city built over a hundred years ago. Because of that, the blocks are neatly divided and laid out in clean, generous grids. Even first-timers traveling with Google Maps open seem unlikely to ever get lost.
This is the Sapporo Factory shopping center. Walking in, it felt roughly like a Starfield mall back home, but with a few differences. For one, they didn’t put up a new building — they kept the old factory buildings and used them as-is. The stores are also enormous, and packed in far less densely.
There’s even a Snow Peak, a brand I got to know well back when I was deep into camping. It was the biggest Snow Peak store I’ve ever seen. I suppose that’s to be expected, since it’s a local brand? They had about three tents pitched, plus all sorts of clothing and a wide range of those Setsubo cups that used to be so hard to get hold of.
My old friend, the Jordan Low… thanks for all the years…
In the end I went with the Force 1. I tried on about six different pairs, and the salesperson was incredibly kind through all of it. The funny thing was that they spoke Korean so well — when I asked, they said they were studying hard because they love BTS. Most of the staff who spoke good Korean also spoke good English. And every single one of them was kind, no exceptions.
I’m not sure what they used to manufacture here, but they kept the large old factory buildings intact and dropped a shopping center right inside. This is a Tully’s, which looked like a local coffee shop. I had an americano and it was really good. The restrooms were clean and the tables were spotless too.
Given how weak the yen is right now, the prices were cheap, but even at a 1:1 exchange rate they wouldn’t have seemed unreasonable. The strange one, honestly, is the cost of living back in Korea…
I’d said I was going to drink it at a table, but maybe something got lost in translation — they gave it to me in a takeout cup and then told me to just use a table anyway. After getting off at Sapporo Station and having lunch, I walked all the way to the Factory, and from there I kept walking to the beer museum. I seem to remember it clocking in at about 22 minutes on foot.
A Japanese bus. It’s a local city bus, the slow kind. You board through the rear door and get off through the front. Everything else is clean, but oddly enough the buses and cars — basically anything running on diesel — didn’t seem to have anything like a DPF. The exhaust smelled strongly of raw(?) diesel being burned. Sapporo’s air is genuinely clean, but they really ought to do something about the vehicle emissions.
I haven’t been to other parts of Japan, but here they’d marked off a lane on the road to be shared with bicycles. I never once saw a car driving in it or parked there. As someone who enjoys cycling back in Korea myself, it made me think: rather than carving up the sidewalk and forcing cyclists to compete with pedestrians, isn’t it better to treat the bike like a vehicle and give it its own marked space on the road?
The beer museum is just behind that oddly shaped building in the middle.
The end of the rail line… Sapporo’s facilities are clean, but almost nothing is what you’d call new. The train I rode in on, the buses, the roads, the buildings — every one of them looks at least ten years old, but as long as it’s still standing, it seems to do its job just fine. My trust kept rising. Except for Google Maps…
This is the Sapporo Beer Museum, which I reached after closing and reopening the maddening Google Maps a couple of times. It used to be a beer production plant, but from what I gathered they now run about three factories across the country and this site serves as a museum.
The old red-brick building is elegant and exotic. I’ll come back to this feeling later, but… Japan modernized so early that most of its roughly hundred-year-old buildings already use modern architectural styles. There are a few Japanese-built houses still standing in Gunsan back home that look similar, if not identical. What I envied was that even after more than a century, these buildings are still in use for one purpose or another, with the exterior and load-bearing walls still doing their job. I’m not a fan of how, back home, we tear things down and rebuild after just 20 or 30 years.
I went through the exhibits with Google Lens running in the Google app, translation switched on. I did the free version. It looked like you could join a paid tour too if the timing worked out, but watching the paid group that went ahead of me, the guide was speaking only in Japanese — so as a foreigner I just took the free route and saw it with my eyes(?).
This museum feels like it was designed by someone who really knows how exhibitions should be done. The lighting is used so well to highlight what’s worth showing and play down what isn’t.
There’s also a colossal vessel that looks like it was used for aging(?). It’s about three stories tall.
Machines whose purpose I couldn’t make out, but with all those passing years written plainly on them…
The lower part of the vessel. The state of preservation is truly impressive.
A scale model of the beer factory…
They’d put up old beer advertising posters. Honestly, I was a little stunned while photographing them. They’ve really done a wonderful job with this exhibition… I thought…
The final stop… a vending machine(?) makes its appearance. Three glasses of beer for 1,000 yen, and I bought two snacks at 100 yen each. 2,200 yen total… It’s Japan’s analog way of paying, but it’s not all that inconvenient. You buy your item from the machine, it prints a paper ticket, and the staff takes that ticket. They then prepare exactly what the ticket says and hand it over, one for one. Writing this now it makes perfect sense, but on a first visit it feels like Korea thirty years ago — though it never actually got in the way of the service.
They pour you three kinds of beer in total. Each glass looked to hold about 300ml…
You carry your own, find an empty table, sit wherever, and have your drink.
It looks impressive, but since I drink fairly often anyway, beer on its home turf wasn’t especially different or moving for me. And it’s not a fresh-tofu-factory kind of setup where they brew it on the spot — they ship it in from factories all across Japan and just pour it here, which might be part of why it didn’t stir anything in me. Or maybe I’m just hard to impress. Either way: Sapporo draft is tasty, but nothing special.
The interior is dotted everywhere with the North Star, Sapporo’s emblem, and it feels put together from old materials — right down to the light fixtures made out of beer bottles…
A gift shop by the exit…
There was all kinds of stuff, from miniature-sized beers to whatever else, but I didn’t buy anything. Too heavy to lug around in my bag after a few beers…
Even now I think skipping the gift shop was the right call. That was the second stop of day one — my visit to the Sapporo Beer Museum.
If you’re someone who walks a lot and has no trouble with it, rather than wrestling with the not-so-easy buses, I’d say it’s nice to travel on foot, taking your time and soaking in the foreign scenery as you go. I’m a born walker myself, and as I’ll get into in the next post, it was a great place to walk yourself into exhaustion. Sapporo Station is well within walking distance.
Thank you.
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