By 1966 the canal was a stagnant, foul-smelling relic of an industry that had ended, and the city proposed filling it in for a six-lane road. What followed was one of the first and fiercest citizens’ preservation campaigns in modern Japan, and it lasted more than a decade.
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.
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.
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.
1,140 m, for barges to warehouse doors
As in almost every Japanese city
Surveys, exhibitions, a festival
Both sides call it a defeat
And tourism replaced the industries that left
Stand where the promenade meets the road. That line is where a ten-year argument ended.
Because it was obsolete. Lorries replaced barges within forty years of completion, the warehouses emptied, and by the 1960s the city proposed filling all 1,140 metres for a six-lane road — as most Japanese cities were doing with their waterways at the time.
A citizens’ preservation society formed in the 1970s that fought the city for more than a decade with surveys, exhibitions and a public festival. Neither side won: the settlement filled half the canal for a narrower road and kept the other half with a landscaped promenade. That compromise is now the image the town lives on.
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