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Sapporo (Sapporo-shi) is the fifth-largest city in Japan by population. It is the capital of Hokkaido Prefecture, located in Ishikari Subprefecture, and an ordinance-designated city of Japan. Sapporo is best known outside Japan for hosting the 1972 Winter Olympics, and the annual Yuki Matsuri in the city, internationally referred to as the Sapporo Snow Festival, which draws more than 2 million tourists from around the world. The city is also home to the eponymous Sapporo Breweries.

Prior to its establishment, the area occupied by Sapporo (known as the Ishikari Plain) was home to a number of indigenous Ainu settlements. In 1866 at the end of the Edo Period construction began on a canal through the area, encouraging a number of early settlers to establish Sapporo village. The settlement's name was taken from the Ainu language, and can be translated as "large river running through a plain".

Sapporo is a city located in the southwest part of Ishikari Plain and the alluvial fan of the Toyohira River, a tributary stream of the Ishikari River. Roadways in the urban district are laid to make grid plan road. The western and southern part of Sapporo are occupied by a number of mountains including Mount Teine, Maruyama, and Mount Moiwa, as well as a lot of rivers including the Ishikari River, Toyohira River, and Sousei River. Sapporo has many parks, and among them, Odori Park is located in the heart of the City and is one of the places that a number of annual events and festivals are held throughout the year. Moerenuma Park is also one of the largest parks in Sapporo, and was constructed under the plan of Isamu Noguchi, a Japanese-American artist and landscape architect.

Sapporo has a humid continental climate (Koppen Dfa), with a wide range of temperature between the summer and winter. Summers are generally hot and humid, and winters quite cold and snowy. It snows a lot in winter, enabling it to hold events and festivals with snow statues and objects. Boasting 630 cm (248 inches) on average, one of the few metropolises in the world with such heavy snowfall. The city's annual average precipitation is around 1,100 mm (43 inches), and the mean annual temperature is 8.5°C (47°F)

Sapporo is one of the popular tourist attractions in Japan, and as of 2006, the annual number of tourists had reached 14,104,000, which was an increase of 5.9% over the previous year (13,323,000 in 2005). 2006 was also the first year for Sapporo when the number of tourists exceeded 14 million, in its history of tourism