Many of you may have seen him on TV. Mr. Satoru Wada, aka "Brasatoru," is a town-walking researcher who has been sharing the fascinating history of Sapporo and Hokkaido in various media. Why is Mr. Wada interested in history? We asked him what kind of activities he would like to pursue in the future.

The old Ome Kaido Road gave birth to a history researcher.

Mr. Wada is now known as a town-walking researcher, but his journey began in Tokyo. In 2008, when he was working in Tokyo, an event was held to commemorate the 400th anniversary of the establishment of the 53 Stages of the Tokaido Highway, and visiting the inns became a big boom. Mr. Wada therefore set out to explore the Ome Kaido. He set out from in front of Isetan in Shinjuku, dividing his days by holidays, and worked his way steadily along.

He said, "When I checked old maps at the library, I found that an ordinary road was an old road.

As he walked along the old road, he found that even though it was an old road, it had been carefully planned, with places of interest at moderate distances and former lodging towns that he could visit when he was getting tired.

I dug deeper into a question I had as a child.

Mr. Wada returned to Sapporo in 2010 for business reasons, but at first he was troubled by the thought that he had returned to an uninteresting city with no history like Tokyo. It was then that he remembered the mystery of streetcar streets, which he had wondered about when he was five years old. He had wondered why, among the many straight streets in the city center, only the area around the Higashi Honganji Temple stop had a gentle curve.

The actual curve

In researching the reason for this, I found a historical document that said that Iwamura Michitoshi, the Kaitakushi judge at the time, and Kuroda Kiyotaka, the vice-minister of the Kaitakushi mission, did not get along with each other. Although the reason for the curving of the road itself could not be determined because no official records remain, Mr. Wada is convinced that the disagreement between the two men led to differences in town planning policies and even distorted the way the road was laid out.

In Honshu, many of the facts are probably forgotten or have been swept under the rug over the years," he said. But in Hokkaido, there are still episodes that have an unmistakable human touch."

Soon after returning to Hokkaido, Mr. Wada began posting information on the Internet under the name "Brasatoru," in reference to the NHK TV program "Bratamori. He also found employment at Arita Publishing Company, which publishes the town information magazine "O.tone," and has developed the serial "Walking with Old Maps" into a popular section that continues to this day.