About the neighborhood
Hokkaido's oldest covered shopping street, founded 1869
Tanukikōji is one of the oldest covered shopping streets in Japan, established in 1869 — just two years after the modern city of Sapporo was founded. The arcade runs for about a kilometre through central Sapporo, parallel to the famous Susukino entertainment district, and is divided into eight blocks (chōme) containing more than 200 shops. The name means 'Raccoon Dog Alley' — tanuki are the mythological shape-shifting creatures of Japanese folklore, and a small Tanuki Shrine sits in the middle of the arcade. Today Tanukikōji is a perfectly preserved cross-section of Hokkaidō life: souvenir shops selling local seafood and dairy, ramen restaurants, izakayas, traditional sweet shops, drugstores, and the inevitable Don Quijote at one end. It is fully covered — essential in Sapporo's brutal winters, when snow piles up to two metres on the streets outside — and has been keeping the city dry, fed and entertained for more than 150 years.
Encyclopedic content adapted from the Wikipedia article on Tanukikōji, used under CC BY-SA 4.0.