Ten years over a ditch

The canal was finished in 1923 and obsolete within about forty years. Lorries replaced barges, the warehouses emptied, and what was left was 1,140 metres of stagnant water in the middle of a town losing population.

The city’s plan was rational: fill it, build the road, move traffic. Almost every Japanese city was doing the equivalent in the 1960s, and almost all of them succeeded.

The people who objected

A preservation society formed in the 1970s and refused to go away. They argued that the canal and the warehouses were the only thing that made Otaru distinguishable from anywhere else — an argument that in 1973 sounded eccentric and now sounds obvious.

They held surveys, ran photographic exhibitions, and organised what became known as the Port Festival to make the case in public. The dispute ran for over a decade and split the town.

Nobody won. The settlement was to fill half the canal for a narrower road and keep the other half, landscaped, with gas lamps and a promenade. Both sides called it a defeat.

And it turned out to be the whole future

The road opened in the 1980s. The remaining half of the canal became the image of Otaru, and tourism became the industry that replaced herring, coal and shipping.

It is worth being precise about the irony: the compromise everyone was unhappy with is now the reason several million people a year come here. Had the preservationists lost completely, Otaru would be a road. Had they won completely, the town might have had a canal and no visitors — the promenade the city built as a consolation is a large part of why people walk it.