The Sapporo Autumn Fest has run in Odori Park every year since 2008, and it has never once needed help drawing a crowd. Last year, across 23 days, roughly 2.39 million people came through, even with several days of bad weather working against it. This year runs September 11th through October 3rd, and there's no reason to expect this one to draw any less of a crowd.

So the interesting part of Autumn Fest was never really "will people show up." It's what the festival assumes about the people who do. And this year, for the first time, it's assuming something new: that some of them are going to show up by themselves, and that's fine.

Block 7, the wine, sake, and craft beer section, is adding two things it's never had before. The first is a proper drink-comparison and producer stand, letting visitors sample and compare directly from the people who made the sake, rather than just buying a cup from a booth. The second is smaller but says a lot: a counter built specifically for solo drinkers.

Festivals are built, by default, around groups. Long tables, shared plates, a crowd you came with. A dedicated space for someone who showed up on their own isn't a big physical change to the layout, but it's a real shift in what the festival is willing to say out loud: the event planned for people showing up alone, on purpose.

Autumn Fest spreads across Odori Park from Nishi 4-chōme to Nishi 11-chōme, and each block runs its own theme rather than mixing everything together. Block 6 covers soup curry and Sapporo's parfait culture, plus a farmers market and a small stage running events throughout the day. Block 7, as above, is the drink section. Block 8 is where individual municipalities from around Hokkaido set up, so it's the fastest way to sample regional specialties from towns you might never otherwise visit. Block 10 is built entirely around Hokkaido meat. Block 11 pairs chef-driven cooking with beer.

The ramen section runs across nine pavilions with a three-phase rotating vendor system, so the lineup genuinely changes depending on when in the 23 days you show up. Visit in week one and week three, and you're not looking at the same menu twice.

Autumn Fest has always been a little bit of a paradox: a festival about Hokkaido's food identity, staged in the most crowded, most public, least Hokkaido-feeling setting the city has, dead center of downtown, packed shoulder to shoulder for three weeks straight. The solo counter doesn't undo that. It just carves out one corner built around showing up alone as the plan.

When: September 11th through October 3rd, 2026 Where: Odori Park, Nishi 4-chōme to Nishi 11-chōme Hours: Typically 10 a.m. to 8:30 p.m., last order around 8 p.m.

If you're only going once, swing by block 7 to see who's sitting at that new counter.

Before it became Sapporo's most famous festival grounds, what was Odori Park originally built to be, back in 1871?

A) A samurai training ground

B) A firebreak dividing the city in half

C) A rice paddy

D) A horse racing track

Keep reading — the answer's waiting for you at the bottom of this issue.

Right now, in a small farming town called Kamifurano near Furano, a handful of families are bringing in Hokkaido's entire commercial hop harvest. It happens fast, usually two weeks between late August and mid-September (although it is a little warmer this year), timed so the hops don't lose quality sitting on the vine. Four farms handle it, contracted with Sapporo Breweries, down from around a hundred in the 1960s. Hop growing here goes back to the 1920s.

That alone would be a nice, quiet local story. What makes it a real find is what happened to a single variety bred there in 1984.

Sapporo's research lab developed a hop in Kamifurano with an unusually loud personality: cedar, lemongrass, dill, nothing like the clean, crisp lagers Japan wanted at the time. They named it Sorachi Ace, after the district. Nobody wanted it. Japanese brewing in the 1980s was chasing a sharp, refreshing finish, and Sorachi Ace was too strange for the job. Sapporo shelved it.

It survived almost by accident. Cuttings ended up in an Oregon State University research planting in the 1990s, sitting in a USDA seed archive. In 2002, a Washington State hop farmer found it there, planted it, and released it commercially in the US in 2006. Craft brewers discovered it during a hop shortage the following year and never let go. Brooklyn Brewery built an entire saison around it, and Brooklyn Sorachi Ace is still the beer most responsible for the hop's cult status, dill and all.

The strange part is, even now, most Sorachi Ace in the world, including the hops in Brooklyn's own beer, is grown in Washington State, not Hokkaido. A hop invented in a Kamifurano field spent twenty years unwanted at home, got picked up on the other side of the Pacific, and became famous under someone else's soil.

Japan is only now catching up to what it once passed on. Sapporo's own tribute beer, SORACHI1984, launched in Hokkaido in 2018 and went national in 2019, built specifically around this hop. Even that beer runs mostly on US-grown Sorachi Ace, blended with a smaller amount actually grown back in Kamifurano. Sapporo has been trying to change that ratio, expanding domestic growing beyond Kamifurano into Tōhoku, new fields in Tago (Aomori) and Karumai (Iwate), and says it's increased domestic Sorachi Ace usage for four years running. Brooklyn Sorachi Ace itself started selling in Japan in 2018, Hokkaido only at first, then nationwide by 2019 once demand caught on.

There's a smaller, more local thread too: one of the Kamifurano growers, Inaba Akira, supplies hops to Sapporo and also to a small Hokkaido craft brewery, Koppukotan Brewing, based right there in town. Whether that particular beer uses Sorachi Ace specifically or one of the area's other varieties isn't something we could confirm, but it means the hop's hometown still has its own small brewery pouring beer made from the same fields.

They also have a phenomenal Tap Room in downtown Sapporo, definitely check them out if you are downtown near Parco (directions here)

Sorachi, the district name itself, comes from the Ainu sōrapuchi, "descending waterfall." Hop cones grow in a cascading, stair-stepped pattern that does resemble one. Whether that's coincidence or just a detail that only becomes visible once you know the word, it's hard to un-see once someone's pointed it out.

The hop farms themselves aren't open for casual walk-up visits, they're private land under contract with Sapporo. But there are real ways in: Sapporo periodically runs a "Special Tour for Beer Fans" that walks the Kamifurano fields alongside a brewery visit, and there's a standing bookable day tour out of Sapporo built around a hop-field lunch of local grilled pork and beer. Worth checking current tour calendars before planning a trip specifically around it, availability isn't constant.

See you out there. · また木曜日に。

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When Sapporo's city grid was first laid out in 1871, planners split it in two: a government district to the north, a residential and commercial district to the south. Odori was the wide, deliberately empty strip built between them, a firebreak meant to stop fire from jumping from one half of the city to the other. It stayed that way for decades before anyone thought to plant flowers in it. The formal park design didn't come until 1909.

So this week, when a couple million people pack into Odori Park for Sapporo Autumn Fest, they're standing on ground that was built, on purpose, to have nothing in it.