Heiwa-dōri Kaimono Kōen (Peace Street Sculpture Walk)
📍 Hokkaido, Asahikawa
Japan's first permanent pedestrian mall, a kilometer of car-free street running from Asahikawa Station lined with roughly 100 outdoor sculptures — including a 28-metre stainless-steel question mark.
Running about a kilometer straight out from JR Asahikawa Station, Heiwa-dōri Kaimono Kōen was built in 1972 as Japan’s first permanent, car-free pedestrian shopping street — and over the decades since, the city has turned it into an open-air sculpture gallery.
Why It’s Interesting
Asahikawa is known as a “city of sculpture,” and this street is where that reputation is most visible: roughly 100 outdoor sculptures line the pedestrian mall, from small bronze figures to genuinely monumental pieces. The two hardest to miss are Zahyō (“Coordinates”), a roughly 28-meter stainless-steel sculpture shaped like a giant question mark, and Kaitaku no Imēji (“Image of Pioneering”), an iron piece about 21 meters tall near the street’s shopping-district intersection. Works by noted sculptors including Chūryō Satō are scattered throughout — a genuinely unusual amount of large-scale public art for a street built primarily as a shopping district.
Best Time to Visit
Open year-round, at any hour — it’s a public street, not a ticketed site, and pleasant to walk in any season the weather allows.
Getting There
Starts immediately outside JR Asahikawa Station and runs to 9-jō-dōri; the whole street is walkable in under 20 minutes, with public parking available nearby for drivers.
🐿️ Cinnamon was here
Field report
Jason wanted "weird outside art," and Asahikawa apparently built an entire street for it back in 1972 — the first permanent pedestrian-only shopping street in Japan, running a full kilometer straight out from the station, and somewhere along the way the city decided to line it with about 100 sculptures.
I ran the whole length of it counting statues until I lost track around forty. The one that stopped me was Zahyō, a stainless-steel question mark twenty-eight meters tall — taller than any tree I've ever lived in, by a wide margin — and not far off, a twenty-one-meter iron piece called Kaitaku no Imēji, "Image of Pioneering." Somewhere in between, a smaller bronze of a saxophonist being watched by a cat made Socks stop and stare for a suspiciously long time.
People keep calling Asahikawa a "city of sculpture," and walking the street end to end, I believe them. My tip: it's flat and paved the whole way, easy walking, and it runs right past Gallery PuruPuru if you want to pair the two.
— Cinnamon 🐿️
📸 Cinnamon's camera roll
Snapshots from our very good boy on the road.
Where it is
You might also like
Gallery PuruPuru
Kawamura Kaneto Ainu Memorial Museum
Nakahara Teijiro Memorial Asahikawa City Sculpture Museum
Otokoyama Sake Brewery Museum
Nearby discoveries
Asahikawa Design Center
Asahiyama Zoo Penguin Walk
Asahikawa Ramen Village
Kamuikotan Gorge
Comments
- No comments yet — be the first to share a tip.