Jawaad Mahmood in Tokyo

Sapporo is a city that reminds me much of dirty little Montreal. Both are among the largest cities in their respective countries (Montreal is the second largest, Sapporo is the 5th), both hosted Olympic games (Sapporo with the 1972 Winter Olympics, Montreal with the 1976 Summer Olympics), and both have similar snowy climates. Montreal was initially a native American settlement by the name of “Hochelaga”; Sapporo was initially a native Ainu community that was called Ishikari. Both have populations in the neighbourhood of 1.5 million people. However, where Montreal is clearly a city on the decline, Sapporo may yet avoid sharing the fate of its older cousin.

The greatest difference between the two cities is clearly cultural – and I don’t mean the obvious differences between Canada and Japan. The Meiji government cracked down on the Ainu culture to the point where parents would hide their Ainu roots from children to protect them from institutional racism. In Montreal, there was great discrimination against the Quebecois culture, until the events of the “Quiet Revolution” in the 1960s. With Francophone Quebecers finally gaining a measure of political power from the old toothless regeme of Maurice Duplessis, they enacted restrictive laws regulating the display of non-French languages in external signage. As a result, the French language has never been as evident in Montreal as it is today. Sadly, economic prosperity have not accompanied the cultural changes. Montreal today is a distant second to Toronto, with Vancouver rapidly on the rise in the immigrant- and oil-fueled red-hot economy of the Western provinces. The lack of a clear vision for Montreal’s economic development, coupled with the political uncertainty caused by the Quebecois seperatist movement, means that it will be a long time before it is ever considered the economic capital of Canada again – if ever.

Sapporo is, if anything, an archetectural cousin of Montreal. A lot of the Downtown buildings reflect a strong Western influence. This is partially because Sapporo was built with the help of American planners. A very easy-to-follow grid system exists, with a quadrant-like system marking each road. Getting from “East-1 North-2″ to “East-3 North-5″ is a lot easier than going from St. Denis to Guy. In this sense, it is more like Edmonton than Montreal.

While most of Montreal’s major corporations have long since moved their headquarters to greener pastures, with the notable exception of Bombardier and Air Canada, Hokkaido still serves as a site with many corporate headquarters. 5 Banks, 7 TV stations, 9 Radio stations, and several large chain stores consider Sapporo their main HQ.

Both Montreal and Sapporo serve multiple train companies. Montreal has tracks belonging to VIA, Amtrak, Canadian National and the Canadian Pacific Railway. Sapporo is host to JR Hokkaido and the Jouetetsu rail companies. Both cities have train stations right in the center of the city. To travel anywhere in Hokkaido, it is hard to avoid going to Sapporo as it is the central rail hub for Northern Japan.

Shopping in Hokkaido is not hobbled by the combination of laws and taxes, and it shows on their main street. Shops are competing with each other at all times, with store employees calling out to people on the street to try to get them to sample their wares. One man in a fish market offered me a great price – it is too bad I don’t particularly like fish =)

Cars are more useful in Sapporo than in any other city in Japan that I saw. Unlike the insane traffic in Tokyo and Osaka, you can actually find parking spaces in Sapporo.

Baseball is celebrated in Sapporo. The Sapporo JR train station has the hand prints of every player on the team, along with the box scores from the latest games. For about 30 years, Montreal had its own baseball team in the form of the Montreal Expos. However, they were never particularly popular after the English population left Montreal in the late 70s. Any remaining enthusiasm for the team was effectively destroyed by firesales of top players and poor management in the early 90s, along with the baseball strike of 1994. It didn’t help that the Olympic Stadium in Montreal, where the Expos played, was a badily designed menace to public health. The design did not take into account Montreal weather, and was shabily built by corrupt union workers who were reknown for their fraudulant practices on the job.

Food is probably an area where Montreal trumphs Sapporo. Like most Japanese cities, there is a variety of restaurants – although they are all generally overpriced. Most of the other restaurants are East Asian, European and American. You are unlikely to find African, Middle Eastern or Indian cuisine with much ease. This contrasts with Montreal where the city is filled with restaurants of every nationality – and they are all more decently priced than anything you will find in Sapporo. The cheese sandwich with coffee, which would cost me about 3 dollars in Montreal cost me 5 or 6 in Sapporo – the tiny cheese cake cost more than something 3 or 4 times its size in Montreal.

Sapporo tower anchors the center of the city, and is faced by a large park. This is probably one of the nicest examples of Urban planning in Japan, most of which is a confusing mess.

As I left on the night train, I found myself haunted by one thought. Looking out the window and seeing the city lights, I realized that I had just left Montreal again – only this was a Montreal that had not been abandoned by reason many many years ago.