Nine hundred metres of roof. Tanukikōji runs east to west as a covered arcade, mixing restaurants and souvenir shops with pharmacies and the shops that sell perfectly ordinary household things nobody photographs. It functions as a tourist street and as a place where people who live in Sapporo buy what they need, and the two uses share the same roof without any evident friction between them. The meaning of a long covered street in a city with this much snow does not require any explaining once you have stood in it in February with the wind going down the cross streets. The souvenir shops are entirely unembarrassed about being souvenir shops, which is its own kind of pleasure in a country full of tasteful ones.

Subway and streetcar lines cross at the centre of the city here, and the surrounding blocks are largely apartments, so a fair number of people simply walk to work in the morning. There are people in the arcade late into the evening, which is not true of most Japanese shopping streets and says a good deal about the winters. The arcade has been rebuilt in sections over the years and the joins are visible if you look up.

In a snow city, an arcade is somewhere to walk before it is somewhere to shop, and everything about how it is used follows from that. The shopping came afterwards, following the walking. The arcade dates from the nineteenth century and has been in continuous use since, which in a city as young as Sapporo makes it close to an origin. Snow is cleared from the cross streets and piled at the entrances. Under the roof, the season stops mattering, which is the entire proposition. That is the right order in which to understand the place.