A visit to Sapporo’s Moerenuma Park

A couple of weeks ago I visited the Moerenuma Park on the outskirts of Sapporo. However, I put off writing about it until now, that the snow has started falling in Sapporo. The Moerenuma Park was designed by Isamu Noguchi who was a famous Japanese American landscape architect.

At the entrance of the park, you can rent bikes for little money (about 200Yen for 2h) which I recommend, as the park is huge. Upon entering the park, which is free, a large glass pyramid greets you. The pyramid houses a large exhibition space and at the time I was there mostly presented average paintings with seemingly no coherent theme.

You can climb the pyramid to get an overview of the park, though!

While I said that it is a pyramid, that’s actually just a half-truth. When seen from another side, the pyramid reveals that it is partly square after all!

That is actually a recurring theme of the park as the objects scattered throughout it appear to change their shape depending on your point of view.
Riding the bike a little further along the laid out paths, I got closer to a hill with a gentle slope. Unfortunately, there are signs saying that you are not allowed to ride your bike to the top.

After riding further around the back of the park, the next object became visible: a stainless steel triangle, designed by Isamu Noguchi himself. As you can see, from this point of view, the glass pyramid seems to be a pyramid again, after all.

Surprisingly, the gentle sloped hill looks totally different from this vantage point! It got a well defined shape in the form of a triangle!

Looking towards the entrance reveals another object, the park’s toilet. You can probably already imagine how one might percieve the toilet to be round from the one side and flat from the other, while keeping the hint of a triangle.

There are also a lot of trees on the park’s premises, all of them carefully planted in a pattern…

Standing next to the toilet, the “gentle sloped hill” now appeares to be an Egyptian style pyramid..

However, that appearance changes once more as you ride further down the path. Now, I had the impression of the one hill being two, but that does not really come out well in this picture.

There is one more hill on the park’s grounds called Mt. Moere which you can climb from all four sides, although only one has stairs.

From the top, I could see all across Sapporo, up to the surrounding mountains! More importantly however, I finally had a good birds-eye view of the park! The framing of the following pictures is moving to the left of the previous picture.

All in all I consider the concept of Moerenuma Park to become a “park that is considered to be one complete sculpture” marvellously well accomplished and do highly recommend a visit if you have the chance! In winter, the available bikes are exchanged for cross-country skis, so I will probably go there once more when there is enough snow.

Thanks for reading!