Kushiro City Museum

Designed by local architect Mozuna Kiko to resemble a crane with outspread wings, the Kushiro City Museum traces the region from the last ice age through modern times. The museum covers Hokkaido's land bridge connection to Eurasia 30,000 years ago, the Ainu cultural tradition and its oral epics, and the near-extinction of the Japanese crane, or tancho, whose population dropped to around 10 birds in 1924 before conservation programs brought it back to roughly 1,800 today. Displays include over 1.4 million prehistoric artifacts recovered from plateau sites above the Kushiro Wetlands.