Why it looks like this

When Japan set out to colonize its northern island after 1868, it built Sapporo as the frontier capital from a clean sheet: a compass-aligned grid on the Ishikari plain, with the green band of Ōdōri — originally a firebreak, now a park — separating the city's north from its south.

The grid became the address system itself: blocks are counted north, south, east and west from the centre, so 'Kita 4 Nishi 5' is an exact location. A frontier village in 1869, Sapporo hosted the Winter Olympics in 1972 and is now Japan's fifth-largest city — still perfectly legible from above.