A long, surreal day that began when I snapped awake at 4:30 a.m., and wound up walking the streets of Shimbashi just after dawn, along with some rather aggressive Tokyo prostitutes, and finished with a great dinner of beer, sashimi and other delicacies with four members of the Sapporo foreign relations department.

I flew to Sapporo from Tokyo today with a translator, Yoshida-san, and we toured parts of Sapporo before  visiting a school to meet with students who  went to Portland last year. Portland has a sister-city friendship with Sapporo that will mark its 50th year this spring, one of the longest sister friendships between any American and Japanese cities. The city officials, students and others were excited to welcome a Portland journalist, and my interview with the shy students, under the watchful eye of the school principal, also was photographed and recorded by a reporter from the Haikkado daily newspaper. It took me a while to get the students to warm up; they were intimidated, I think, by the setting. But I told them that so far all that I had done in Sapporo was visit a giant trash incinerator (true) and that unless they opened up about their city, I would go back to Portland and write solely about Sapporo and its incinerator, and that got them finally to open up. They were really charming kids, and they followed me outside after the interview, and shook my hand and wanted to pose for pictures. 

The city officials were abuzz about the mayoral sex scandal in Portland, and had lots of questions about what’s going on, and what’s going to happen. There’s some anxiety about the timing of a big delegation of Sapporo citizens scheduled to visit Portland in June, timed not only for the Rose Festival, but also perhaps for the beginning of the effort to recall Sam Adams. 

There is a lot of curiosity and interest here in Portland, and I hope to write a piece encouraging Portlanders to have more interest in and curiosity about their Japanese sister. There is a lot of pride about Sapporo, a city of 1.8 million that is just coming out of another long winter, with old snowdrifts still piled around town. 

Tomorrow I am scheduled to visit the ski jump built for the Sapporo Olympics, a beautiful concert hall that cost more than $150 million to build, interview the city’s climate change and sustainability experts and chat with the mayor of Sapporo before flying back to Tokyo. This has been great fun so far.