If you're downtown for the SYNC north opening, Queen's Soft Cream Cafe is a few minutes' walk from Tanukikoji at moyuk SAPPORO — itself a Sapporo institution that relocated in 2024 after nearly 20 years inside Sapporo Esta. It's one of six spots across the city we picked for an afternoon built entirely around soft cream.

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Three hours north of Sapporo, there's a farming town that decided its identity would be picture books. Not settling for just a museum wing, but the actual town.

It started in 1988, when a visiting Tokyo children's book editor looked out over Kenbuchi's farmland and told locals it reminded him of Europe, where original picture book art gets treated as real art, with dedicated museums. Japan had almost nothing like that. Kenbuchi decided to fix the gap, and built Ehon no Yakata — part library, part art museum, with a room-sized "tree pond" filled with 100,000 wooden balls that kids can climb into. Free admission, closed Wednesdays.

The town still runs an annual picture book award every year — this year is the 36th — with entries on display through September 30th and public voting open now. Don’t expect a stadium or a landmark tower. Just a farming community that decided this was worth building, and forty years of follow-through.

On March 29th, about 1,900 people showed up to watch a movie theater close.

That's not a typo. This wasn't a grand reopening or a festival crowd, just people who wanted to be there for the last screening at Satsugeki, a small cinema tucked into Tanukikoji 5-chōme that had been showing films on that exact stretch of street, in one form or another, since 1925. Fans came from outside Hokkaido to catch it. The theater's walls were covered floor to ceiling in autographs from directors, actors, people who'd stopped by between shoots because Satsugeki was the kind of place filmmakers actually wanted their signature on. Manager Yokosawa Yasuhiko thanked the room and closed it down for good.

If you walked past Tanukikoji this spring and wondered why there was a line of people quietly grieving outside a movie theater, that's why.

The building's cinema history goes back further than most locals realize. A theater called Sanyūkan opened on this spot in 1925. Over the following century, the space changed hands and names more than once. The lineage traces back to a playhouse founded in 1917 called Sapporo-za, and the name that stuck through most of that run, Sapporo Gekijō, or "Sapporo Theater," survived 108 years of operators, renovations, and near-closures before anyone shortened it to the nickname everyone actually used: Satsugeki.

The most recent chapter almost didn't happen. The theater's prior incarnation closed in June 2019 when the building it occupied became too old to safely operate. Rather than let it disappear, the community crowdfunded its return, 773 backers, roughly ¥12 million, and it reopened in July 2020 under the Satsugeki name, in a different space in the same block, right as the pandemic made reopening a cinema about the worst-timed business decision imaginable. It made it back anyway, and spent the next six years as one of Hokkaido's only real mini-theaters. This is the kind of place that showed the films the big chains wouldn't touch, some of which never played anywhere else in the prefecture. It became something of a pilgrimage site for certain anime fans, too, the way a handful of theaters worldwide quietly become tied to a specific title or director.

It finally closed for a simpler, less romantic reason than any of that: the operator chose not to renew the lease. This was just a business decision that ended a hundred-year run.

The site isn't sitting empty for long. A venue called SYNC north is opening on the same footprint: 1,500 square meters, built to hold roughly 1,000 people, and designed to run two completely different lives depending on the hour. By day, it functions as a live house across two separate performance floors. By night, it becomes a full nightclub, with bar lounges spread across three floors and a production and lighting system built specifically for the space. Local coverage describes it as the largest venue of its kind currently opening in Hokkaido.

The grand opening is set for September 18th. Before that, SYNC north quietly opened its doors for two nights only (August 14th and 15th, free admission, 7 p.m. to midnight) to let people test-run THEATER 1's main floor and its new production system ahead of the real launch. If you were in Tanukikoji those two nights, you got a preview almost nobody outside Sapporo has seen yet.

It's a strange, fitting handoff. A single-screen cinema that survived on word of mouth and stubborn community support gives way to a thousand-person hybrid venue built for exactly the opposite kind of night out: loud, communal, built for crowds instead of a hushed room watching a film nobody else in Hokkaido was showing. Tanukikoji isn't losing its edge so much as swapping which edge it's got.

If you caught the SYNC north preview nights in August, we'd genuinely like to hear what it was like. Send us a note for a future issue.

See you out there. · また木曜日に。

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Trivia Answer: C) Roughly 80%

When Japanese settlers arrived, they mostly didn't rename the land, they just wrote down what the Ainu already called it, using kanji chosen for their sound rather than their meaning. That's why so many Hokkaido place names look unreadable at a glance, the characters were picked to approximate an Ainu word, not to mean anything in Japanese.

Sapporo itself is a good example. It comes from the Ainu sat poro pet, "dry, big river," describing the Toyohira River that runs through the city today. You're technically living inside a description of a river every time you say the city's name.