“Sapporo was laid out in 1869 and has a street plan like New York’s … The result is a checkerboard that was considered at the time of the city’s founding to be “modern” and “Western”. Ironically, the Japanese city that Sapporo most resembles in this respect is Kyoto, laid out on an exactly similar pattern in the year 794 in imitation of China’s three-thousand-year-old capital of Ch’ang-an. “Modernity” is an oddly blinkered concept.”
— Alan Booth, The Roads to Sata
