Historical Viallage of Hokkaido

Hokkaido has all kinds of old stuff. My favorite happens to be old houses, Japanese architecture and culture. So we headed off to the Historical Village of Hokkaido to see those things. It was amazing.

The village has about 60 buildings that are over 100 years old. Most of them have the original furnishings inside. We saw all sorts of buildings like a doctor's office, newspaper place, restaurants, college dorms, a school, warehouses, and a silk worm factory, complete with a ferris wheel for the worms enjoyment - or death. Pretty cool stuff. You can go into all of them and see how people lived. This is a sake brewing company. The barrels that hold the sake are huge.


I really enjoyed the newspaper printing office. It's hard to imagine stocking all of the characters necessary to write a newspaper in Japan. There are about 3000 kanji. It made me feel nostalgic for the times when I used to run down my grandparents stairs and see their printing press. Those were scary times filled with spiderwebs, dust, and amazement. This museum was nice and covered in snow.