Rusutsu: Hokkaido Redux

In mid-January, barely back from our christmas vacation, I was back in Hokkaido again, this time for a three-day neuroscience workshop. It's a yearly event, held at Rusutsu ski resort west of Sapporo. It's in the middle of nowhere, but it's easy to get there by bus directly from Chitose airport.

Rusutsu resort hotel. The green-clothed skiers are a high-school tour group, enrolled in a snowboard class. There were lots of school and university student groups staying at the hotel. Unlike working people, students can take time off mid-week for skiing, and they're price-sensitive travellers so cheaper weekday skiing probably appeals to them for that reason too, I guess.

It may sound a little strange to schedule a workshop at a resort hotel, but it's not a bad idea at all. They have a lot of experience handling large travel groups and have very good group discounts; they have much more and cheaper space than cramped city hotels so there's plenty of room for presentations, poster sessions and demonstrations; and they're well provided with restaurants, pubs, shops and the like so people don't need to venture away - and split up - for food or drinks. Most of their business is on weekends, so hosting conferences and tour groups is a good way to fill up rooms during the week.

Rusutsu is a full-service resort. There's a dozen restaurants, cafés, various shops (both souvenirs and actual useful stuff like ski-wear), convenience stores, a bathhouse and swimming pool, conference rooms, playground, equipment rental and ski schools and so on. It's actually two mountains and two hotels, with a cable car and a monorail connecting them. I didn't check the slope maps but the system looks to be fairly extensive and the slopes seemed very well prepared from what I saw.

The cabin main room, at 2:30 in the morning, and some of the students were having a party. Of course, it being graduate students, the talk was mostly about the day's presentations and each other's research.

Our accommodation (I stayed at a log cabin with a dozen other people rather than a hotel room) was breakfast and dinner included; for dinner you got a meal ticket you could use for a dinner course at any restaurant. We had washoku the first night and chinese the second, and both courses were extensive and enjoyable. We only had one hour scheduled for dinner, however, which was too short for these slow-paced meals - we had to skip dessert the first night so we didn't miss the speaker.

There was some time set aside for skiing, but I passed this time. It's still business travel, ski slopes or not, and I had plenty of work to focus on, especially as it was my first time at this workshop. Also, I haven't actually stood on a pair of skis for over twenty years; I'd really hate to miss half the workshop on account of having my leg set and put in a cast. If I return next year, however, I'd love to take a half-day snowboarding course. Never done that, and it looks like fun.

Rusutsu is a summer resort as well, with golf courses, and a large amusement park. The park is completely snowed over in winter but to me that just makes it more interesting. I couldn't get far into the park itself due to the snow; next time I'll rent snow shoes.

Instead, I took some time for a walk and a few pictures. I couldn't get very far with all the snow, but there's still a fair amount of interesting scenery near the hotel. I only brought the Pentax 67 with me, which forces you to slow down and think things through before pressing the shutter. You only have ten images on a roll. The film was Ektar 100, a very fine-detail film with good colour, but as it's fairly slow you're pretty much forced to rely on a tripod for everything but daytime outdoor shots.

The amusement park is pretty large. They have the shrewd idea of buying up the better attractions of closed amusement parks rather than having original - expensive - designs. If you like rides, this is probably a very good place to come in summer.

I love this kind of still winter dusk, when the light is fading and colors are muted. There's no wind and not a sound to stir the moment.

Main hall, New Chitose airport south of Sapporo. This kind of public decoration I like. It's thematically right for the place, and I enjoy the whimsy of taking a child-like design, blow it up to full size and display as if it really could work. It hangs opposite a Da Vinci flying machine-style design; an interesting contrast in imagination, though of course neither would ultimately be able to fly in reality.

Hokkaido III: Sapporo and Otaru

We left Kussharo and ambled back with the same train we came. In Kushiro we boarded the JR express to Sapporo, four hours away.

The line between Kushiro and Sapporo follows the sea coast, then cuts inland through the central mountains. It makes for some good scenery along the way. Here's the north pacific on the southern coast of Hokkaido.

Sapporo station is big and busy. You have plenty of souvenir shops with stuff from all over Hokkaido, and on the top floor food court of the adjoining mall there's a ramen area with several popular Hokkaido ramen chains. Plan for plenty of waiting time; it's been crowded every time I've gone there.

We stayed two nights in Sapporo, and spent the better part of one day in nearby Otaru on the coast north of Sapporo itself. Sapporo is a fairly large city - fifth largest in Japan I believe - and it feels like it. The streets are bustling (no mean feat when they're covered in ice and snow) and the city feels as alive in dead of winter as it did on my business trip last summer.

Despite the cold and the snow - or because of it - the city is very pleasant to walk around, even at night. All the streets are well-lit and plowed and the sidewalks are generally snow-free. The white snow lits up the ground and makes the city feel warmer and brighter than places like Osaka further south.

Sapporo Beer Garden.

Sapporo is the hometown of Sapporo Beer, and the old brewery is converted to a "Djingis Khan" restaurant - Japanese lamb barbecue, with no connection to Mongolia other than the catchy name; café, party space and souvenir shop. Yes, it's touristy. Yes, it's frequented by package-tour groups coming in by the bus load. And yes, I'm sure there's better Djingis Khan places to be had elsewhere in the city. But it is fun, and it is good, and it is inexpensive. And let's face it, things become popular and touristy precisely because they offer something that many people appreciate.

You can get an all-you-can-eat barbecue course, but I would recommend ordering stuff off the menu instead. Unless you're a Sumo wrestler it won't be any more expensive, and you can get a wider variety of stuff to grill, such as wonderful meaty sausages, or these juicy lamb chops and delicious scallops.

If you like beer, I do recommend the all-you-can drink option however. They have four or five beers on offer, including Yebisu Black, my favourite Japanese dark beer, and it'll be cheaper if you drink three beers or more. Which you can easily do, as it seems the beer is a bit lower in alcohol than the store-bought stuff.

When I asked if it was, the waitress said that "it comes straight from the restaurant brewery next door". Which isn't really a "no", of course. They may well brew it somewhat weaker for the restaurant; if they do, then good. Light beers especially tend to taste better with a little less alcohol, and you can enjoy more beer without getting drunk.

Susukino is an entertainment district toward the south. We ate in a bustling izakaya there before returning to our hotel the last night. The place was packed full, so we got counter seats right in front of the fish cooks; way more fun than sitting at a table.

As we returned from Susukino the temperature rose to just around freezing point and there was snow in the air. The result is a diffuse mist that bathes the world in a faint silvery shimmering light.

Otaru

Otaru is a smaller town on the coast north of Sapporo. It's the closest port to Sapporo, so it long served as a gateway to the island. Large trading houses and banks used to have offices here, often in imposing stone buildings. The companies and banks have mostly disappeared, but fortunately - and rarely, for Japan - the city has preserved the old buildings, and the town has become a popular sightseeing destination.

Otaru is a quick train ride from Sapporo so it's easy to go there just over the afternoon. The station is still a charming old-style wooden construction, decorated with glass lanterns from Otaru Glass.

The day was grey and overcast, with occasional flurries of snow. This canal-side painter persevered in the cold, even when an unwanted critic flew in for a closer look.

This harbour-side canal is perhaps the most famous of the city views. The old warehouses are all converted to restaurants and shops. One of them houses Otaru Beer brewery, with a beer hall and tours of the brewery itself. Their "Dunkel" dark beer is so-so but the Pilsner is really good and the Weissbier is among the best I have tried. If you don't want to carry bottles around the beer is available - though more expensive - at the airport as well.

Otaru Glass is a large glass maker in the city, and another popular destination. Their signature product seems to be oil lanterns in glass, and they have a café lit entirely by oil lamps and nothing else. The place is very warm from all the oil lamps and the atmosphere is still, almost church-like, even when full of guests. It's a great place to thaw out in winter, with a mug of tea or hot cocoa and perhaps a cake or two.

Before leaving Sapporo and Hokkaido we stopped by Satosuisan, a well-known fishmonger. They have a large selection of fish and seafood, both fresh and cooked. If there's any reason to be envious of people living here, this is it. We got smoked and fresh salmon, pate, vinegared squid and other things too. All fresh, high quality and much cheaper than in Osaka.

There's more pictures in the Sapporo set and the Otaru set on Flickr.

Last meal before leaving Hokkaido. "Taj Mahal" Indian restaurant in Sapporo, a couple of blocks south of the station, has a cheesy interior but the food is good and the atmosphere is warm and friendly. It's the kind of place I'd be happy to go whenever I'm in the neighbourhood.

Train to the New Chitose airport, and onwards home.

Hokkaido II: Kussharo

Kussharo is a remote rural area in eastern Hokkaido, in the Akan national park. We've come here once before, on our honeymoon, to stay at a youth hostel in the area run by an old friend of Ritsuko's. You take the train north from Kushiro, like we did now, or go east then south from the town of Abashiri in the north like we did last time. Either way it's a small two-car diesel-powered "rail bus"-train that's slow enough that you can see the sights outside, and charming enough that you don't mind the noise and rattle.

The remains of an old-style silo. I guess farms have gotten fewer but bigger over time.

Kussharo is rural, but it's not a wilderness. Much of the area is farmland, streets are paved and there's clusters of summer homes and even the (very) occasional shop and restaurant¹. Still, it's a long way from downtown Osaka. That, of course, is a big part of the appeal. It's a refreshing change to sleep without the sound of sirens, to go outside into wide-open stillness rather than bustling streets. To soak in an open-air hot spring on a winter night and see the stars, undimmed by the reflected glow of a large city.

The main industries in this area are farming and tourism, and Kussharo seems to share many problems with similar areas in Japan and elsewhere. Neither farming nor tourism need a lot of people - the sparse population is part of the attraction for tourists of course. But that means there's not enough people living in the area to support a dense infrastructure. Travelling here and getting around becomes more difficult and expensive than in populated areas. That hurts tourism of course, even though the very remoteness is a draw for people like us².

Another problem, all too familiar to rural areas, is that the number of children can barely support a local school. A school is a critical bit of infrastructure; without it, no family with children would consider moving in, and young couples would often elect to move once their children reach school age. Without a school, the area would lose its next generation of inhabitants and risk disappearing as a community altogether.

Kussharo Genya youth hostel. Good place to stay.

Anyway, we stayed here right over Christmas. Every year, the hostel owner - Kazuyuki, a trained chef - puts on a Christmas sushi buffet, with all you can eat nigiri sushi, soup and cake. There were only a few other guests apart from us - as I said, travel is light the week before the New Year holiday - but with the owner and his family and the other staff we were still a fair number of people.

The sushi party is prepared. Plates of nigiri sushi - a dozen kinds, give or take - were prepared beforehand, and once they were gone Kazuyuki was taking requests from the adjoining kitchen.

The first night we didn't really do anything much. Ritsuko stayed at the hostel while I joined a guest from Hong Kong and went to a rotenburo - an outdoor hot spring - right next to Kussharo lake. We spent much of the next day walking in the snow-covered landscape, and joined the sushi party that night. The next morning we left again for Sapporo. Two or three nights really is just about right for this place in winter.

There's a few more pictures in the Kussharo set on Flickr.

The side roads across the fields aren't plowed, but there's enough traffic that you can use the tire tracks. That's Ritsuko over to the right.

A farmer has had a bit of fun when stacking the hay bales.

--

#1 Surprisingly, many facilities are closed over winter; I would have thought this was the high season for visitors. Guess not.

#2 That's people for you: we want remote, wide spaces, undisturbed by civilization - but we want that wilderness with good wireless connections, all-night convenience stores, a decent selection of restaurants and a bus stop or train station no more than five minutes away.

Hokkaido I: Kushiro

Very delayed, but here's part one of (probably) three posts about our Hokkaido trip. I took three vacation days (oh, the luxury! the decadence!) and cunningly mixed them with calendar holidays to create a six-day christmas vacation. We flew to Kushiro on the south-eastern coast of Hokkaido where we stayed over night. Then on to Kussharo in the center of Hokkaido for two nights, and finally by train to Sapporo in the west where we stayed for the final two nights.

Kushiro manhole cover. These are so convenient; you have yourself an instant logo for every place you visit here in Japan.

Kushiro is a city and airport on the south-west coast of Hokkaido. It's not a tourist destination, really; it seems to mostly live by fishing and other industry in the area. There's large wetlands to the north, a crane reservation towards the airport and wildlife preserves in the area. It seems to attract a fair number of hikers, birdwatchers and fishermen, most of whom of course really just pass through the city itself.

Now, the bad thing about Kushiro is, it feels like a sleepy town of, oh, 30-40 thousand people. It's bad because the population is actually over 180.000 people, but the city center is in bad shape. There are few people around and it seems every third building is shuttered or empty along the major streets. And not just shops either, but hotels and entire office buildings stand abandoned. Cheap business hotels are doing well though; many bankers, lawyers and real estate people travel here for bankrupcy and foreclosure proceedings.

Side street in the city center, just on the corner to the north-south main street from the station. Moody and photogenic, true, but I can't honestly say it makes me want to settle down in the area.

An eloge to Ritsuko, who did her level best to stand still for the four-second exposure.

Without businesses to fill all those buildings there's a lack of jobs to be had. And without work, the young people leave for Sapporo in the east - or for Tokyo-Nagoya-Osaka, away from Hokkaido altogether. And once people leave they're not likely to come back. The recession is accelerating things of course, but Kushiro and other places like it has been losing people for years; major metropolitan hubs the world over are growing at the expense of smaller regional communities.

And in the case of Kushiro, some of the blame also falls on the city itself. According to locals, there's several new malls open in the suburbs, malls that are doing OK, but sucking the life out of the city center. That in turn hurts tourism and discourages people from moving here - who wants to live in a gloomy ghost town after all, if you can avoid it? Approving the construction of large malls on the periphery may make financial sense in the short term, but hurts the city badly over time. And the loss of tax revenue from the center and the cost of "revitalization efforts" probably eats most of the tax revenue from those malls anyway.

The city is quite pleasant to walk around in, and it feels there should be more people and more activity than there is. Here's a koban - a neighbourhood police station - right next to a park.

The good things about Kushiro, on the other hand, are very good. Delicious in fact. It is, of course, the food. We had dinner, breakfast buffé and lunch, in that order, and were not served a single molecule that was anything less than delicious.

Fish on sale along the main street. If you like fish, Hokkaido is the place to go. Better, fresher and cheaper than anywhere else in the country.

The breakfast buffé at the chain hotel (Tokyo Inn) had several varieties of fish including salmon and whole shishamo; miso soup, okayu, natto and rice; breads, sausage, ham, potatoes and scrambled eggs; tofu, onsen tamago and udon; salads, fruit and yoghurt; milk, juices, tea (Japanese and English) and coffee (regular and espresso). It was far beyond any I've had at a business hotel before in both variety and quality, and better than most breakfasts I've had at much higher class hotels.

Lunch was Kushiro-style ramen - thin noodles in a soy-based soup. And while it was light it was still savoury and warming - perfect after a few hours of walking along the waterfront.

The high point was "Aburiya", a Robata-style restaurant, where the food - fish and meat - is cooked on large charcoal griddles in the middle of the room. Here, again, every single thing we ordered was great. We weren't the only ones to think so either; the restaurant was packed with locals, and we only just managed to get two seats along the counter. Which, by the way, is much more fun than getting a table, as you can see the cooks work the hot griddles. We had hokke, hoya, ramen salad, steak, "Inka potatoes" (yellow and very flavourful, served with butter), onigiri, ochazuke and clam miso soup.

Kushiro is known for its robata restaurants. Aburiya is recommended by a fair number of people, and for good reason.

Hokke is a kind of mackerel native to the Hokkaido area. It's often served like this: opened, dried, then grilled and eaten like this. The savoury, firm meat is delicious as is; lemon or soy sauce would only dilute the taste. The plate in the background is a ramen salad.

Hoya is sea squirt, a relative of the sea anemone, for instance. It's swims freely as a juvenile, but as an adult it settles onto a rock and makes a living by siphoning the water for algae. At Aburiya you lightly grill it yourself at the table, and eat with a drop of lemon. I really liked hoya - it's similar in flavour and texture to grilled oysters - but Ritsuko didn't really take to it.

Harbour shovel pillar

The waterfront is another asset of the city. It's pretty cool, with a mix of working boats and some tourist-oriented stuff. Fishing boats lie right along the river towards the sea, and the heavy barges, coast guard vessels and other "real" working stuff is easy to get to and see up close.

There's a shopping market and community center of sorts - MOO - right on the river edge that is surprisingly good, with lots of local products, eateries, exhibition areas, a Hello Work office, an arboretum (very pleasant in the winter) and so on. It wasn't exactly bustling, but it wasn't empty either. We got a bottle of the local sake, and some really tasty cheese-senbei. There is - or was, I'm not sure - a local brewery nearby with pub and tours as well, but it was closed when we got there. The week around christmas is low season for travel here (the New Years holiday starts one week later), so our impression of things may well be more downbeat than normal.

There's more pictures of Kushiro in my Kushiro set on flickr, for anyone interested.

 

The waterfront is right in the city center, south of the station. Working boats lie right along the city streets and bridges.

Squid fishing boats use rows of bright lamp lights to attact squid at night. This, by the way, caused some issues when oil prices spiked a couple of years ago; the generators they use to power the lights consume a fair amount of diesel. Squid fishermen demanded (and, I think, got) a subsidy for the lamp diesel. I can't help thinking there has to be a less wasteful way of doing it.

A raven or some crovid is sunning itself, with a river bridge in the background.

Harbour dredges, one working, one laid up, in the harbour. There's something irrationally cool about huge machinery. Or it's just me.

The False Tap

My scanner is back home again, it's working nicely and I've already started scanning the film I took during our trip to Hokkaido in December. The posts will have to wait a while longer, though, as I don't have all that much time to spend on image editing right now.

However, I thought I'd show you this neat cognitive hack we found at our hotel in Sapporo:

The bathroom sink, with a normal tap and faucet handle to the left, and a slender tap marked "Drinking Water" to the right.

Here's the same sink from below. The water pipe enters from the upper right, splits, and goes to the "Drinking Water" tap on the left and to the faucet handle in the center, where it continues to the tap itself on the right.

The "Drinking Water" tap and the normal tap right next to it give you the exact same water, in other words. Fraud? Deception? No, not at all. Just a neat psychological trick to make their customers more comfortable.

Tap-water in Japan (as in Sweden and some other countries) is not only safe to drink, but often quite good. If you live here you never need think twice about drinking water directly from a tap. In many countries, however, even wealthy and highly developed ones, tapwater is unsafe, or if safe then not very palatable due to high mineral levels, chlorine or other reasons. If you live in such a place you either drink bottled water or you have a water filter with its own tap¹. And so the hotel receives plenty of guests that do not consider tap-water to be drinkable.

The hotel could put up signs of course, telling their guests that the water is safe and good. And indeed, I've seen such signs in many hotels. The problem is, we humans are lousy at heeding signs and directions², and a lifelong habit prevents many of these guests from trusting the tap water, sign or no sign.

Another option would be to provide each room with bottled water. And they do that already, for a fee, in the hotel bar and in vending machines. But most people aren't very happy with having to pay for plain water when they're thirsty or need to take some medication. It smacks of greed, like having to pay extra for towels. Supplying free water bottles would add another ongoing expense, and create a small mountain of empty bottles - an environmental PR headache as well as increasing garbage disposal costs.

Instead, they add this tap. Mind you, it is completely accurate and on the level - it really is good, clean, tasty drinking water. It's in fact likely to be the exact same water as the local bottled water. The tap doesn't change the water; all it does is package the water to make it palatable for its guests. And really, that's all bottled water does too, just at added cost and with environmental and disposal headaches.

And I bet this really works. Our low-level emotions - such as disgust, which deals with what is safe to eat, drink and touch - aren't very analytical. They tend to work on concrete and immediate things, not abstract or long-term ones. Many people from places with bad water won't drink tap water even when they know it's safe and good. Their low-level emotions have learned that "tap = bad" and their sense of disgust will kick in whether they want it to or not.

But this tap looks and feels different - and it's just the kind of tap you'd have from a water filter. Even though the guests may well realize it's just tap water, their low-level disgust never reacts since it doesn't look like the kind of tap that is dangerous. And it really needs to look and feel different; the more different the better. Had they added a second, normal tap with a sign it wouldn't have worked at all, even if that tap had been connected to an actual water filter.

It's all about fooling your low-level emotions. They have a huge influence on our behavior and they don't do subtlety, foresight or abstractions very well. We spend a fair amount of our high-level mental resources subverting, co-opting and otherwise manipulating our own low-level systems in order to make ourselves do what we want.

When you put away the cake or the bowl of snacks just so you'll stop eating; when you turn away and bite your lip to distract yourself and lessen the fear of an injection; when you bring a lucky charm or other "safe", familiar object to an anxiety-inducing test or interview; when you deliberately buy groceries when full so you won't impulse buy, you're engaged in a battle or wits with your own low-level emotions.

These low-level emotional systems are really fascinating; I used to work in that area and sometimes wish that I'd continued doing so. I may return to that field someday.

--

#1 Or you're poor and have no choice but to drink bad water. Or you don't have ready access to water at all. Which is an outrage, but off-topic to this particular post.

#2 When was the last time you bothered to actually read the instructions for a gadget? Especially for a simple one, like a tap, that you already think you know all you need to use.

Back again (again)

Came back from Hokkaido again last night. I have some deadlines coming up so not much time to post, but in short Hokkaido has lots of snow; Rusutsu ski resort is comfortable and pleasant; the skiing looked great but I never had time to actually do any; the workshop itself was well worth the trip; and amusement parks look pretty cool when they're closed over winter and covered in snow.

To Hokkaido (again)

I'm off to Hokkaido yet again, next week. This time it's work though; there's a three-day workshop on neuroscience and neurocomputing and we're presenting a couple of posters on our work so far. This workshop is held twice a year and I attended last summer too. It's a fairly informal meeting so it's easy to talk with people and learn about what other groups are doing.

The venue for the winter workshop is Rusutsu, a large winter sports area in Hokkaido. Which sounds glamorous and all, but I'll be bunking in a cabin with five other, completely unknown, people, and I'll be too busy to have any time for any actual skiing. Also, this is a resort-type of place so there's no internet in the cabin, and I can't be sure there's a connection available at the workshop either. On the upside it gives me some truly free time to work on stuff without distraction.

Back to Work

We're back from Hokkaido. We came home late last night and only did the most pressing things (like putting away all the salmon, squid, sausages and cheeses we've bought) before collapsing in bed.

Today is a work day for me, and tomorrow is the first day of the New Year holidays, which last until monday next week this year. We have a single monday workday before a week off, in other words, and needless to say, the department isn't exactly a buzzing hive of frantic activity today. There's a grand total of three students in the main room, and none of the other postdocs or faculty have yet to show up. Most of them have taken the day off, of course.

Me, I have a poster and a presentation to prepare for next month, and I've yet to finishn the modeling I was hoping to have done by then. So I work today, and I expect to plod away at it over the holiday as well.

I have plenty to do, there's a big pile of pictures to go through, and two rolls of film to develop and scan. Don't expect quick, complete Hokkaido holiday coverage here in other words.

Japanese crane, Hokkaido. Quick train shot.

Merry Christmas!

We're in Hokkaido for Christmas, where we're relaxing far away from the stresses of city life. We had a sleep in, had a long walk in the snow-covered countryside, I've just returned from a long soak in the hostel's hot spring bath, and with any luck we'll be stuffed to the gills with sushi and beer by tonight. And just so you see what we're leaving behind:

Crowds gather along Shinsaibashi shopping street to celebrate the true meaning of Christmas. Go ahead, click on the image; it looks much better large.

Huge Friendly Duck says Merry Christmas!

Sapporo

Sapporo manhole cover
with the old clocktower

I was in Sapporo in Hokkaido last weekend on a quick work-related trip. It's Japan's fifth largest city with about 1.9 million inhabitants. It's a fairly new city, and it shows: all the streets are laid out in a neat north-south and east-west pattern, with addresses indexed by the number of streets from the central block with the old clock tower.

As it happened, the meeting and travel schedule left us with part of a day to wander around the city on our own. I'd been there only once before, for a couple of days in winter. It was before I'd moved to Japan; I understood not a word of Japanese and had not a clue about anything related to Japanese society. Combine it with some severe jetlag and my impressions at the time were positive but very fragmentary and confused.

Yes, Sapporo is the kind of city that runs tram lines on the street. Didn't have time to use them, unfortunately.

 
This time it was high summer, no jetlag and I have a better handle on life in this country. To take one example: When we were there about seven years ago we went looking for a place to eat outside our hotel. We failed to find anything until we got to the station and its underground arcade. I happened to pass by the same hotel this time and saw immediately that there are half a dozen restaurants right across the street. Of course, they didn't have big windows or pictures of food, and the signs did not say "restaurant" in English so we completely missed them at the time.

Colorful street

The city is pleasant. Really pleasant; it's seems to be the most comfortable city I've ever visited. The summer climate is near perfect - still hot, but without any of the muggy, clingy humidity of Osaka and other southern cities. From what I remember of my last visit, the winters are also very pleasant, with lots of snow but not very cold.

The whole city layout feels open and clear, with wide, straight streets, broad sidewalks everywhere and no hills or other obstacles to getting around. There's hardly a street without a row of leafy trees to shade you, and lots of parks and green areas wherever you go.

 

Sapporo is ancestral home to Sapporo beer, and there's both a beer museum and famous Beer Garden that we had no time to visit. But during the high summer in August, a lot of beer companies set up temporary beer gardens in the Odori park; you can find Sapporo, Kirin, Asahi and even foreign beer companies here, with beer (of course) and light foods such as sausages, yakiniku and so on.

It's a large city so everything you'd expect seems to be here, from department stores and large bookstores to small specialists and oddball services. It's a popular tourist destination so much of the business is service oriented. The summer is a major tourist season, and the city center was bustling with people. The city is otherwise famous for it's winter festival, with a large snow-sculpture competition, and the city is popular with skiers.

Sunday featured an amateur music festival along the avenue going south from the train station. They closed off the street for the entire afternoon (I think; I was busy the rest of the day), and amateur bands set up and played. Here's one band doing a decent cover of Guns N' Roses Welcome to the Jungle" (a female vocalist works really well for that song).

If this sounds like I'm some gushing fanboy at least I'm not alone. The population of Sapporo has been increasing even the last couple of years, in the face of the economic recession and even as the population of Hokkaido is dropping. Sapporo itself now houses about a third of the inhabitants of the island. Apparently this causes a fair amount of friction between Sapporo and the rest of Hokkaido; I guess that's more or less unavoidable.

Even the graffiti manages to be interesting rather than ugly. I have no clue whatsoever what this means.

Akan National Park

Snowed-over field, south of lake Kussharo.

On the eastern side of Hokkaido, in the interior, lies three large lakes; lake Akan, Kussharo and Mashu, forming the Akan national park. And right in between those lakes lies the Kussharo Genya youth hostel, which happens to be run by a friend of Ritsuko's and his family.

You may expect a largely depopulated wilderness area akin to Sarek or Abisko national parks in Sweden, but that is not quite the case. Hokkaido is just too densely populated to really support large swaths of wilderness, and Akan is criss-crossed by roads and dotted with farms and fields, vacation homes, guest lodgings and other facilities. That said, the area is very beautiful, roads and all, and a welcome change from Osaka. In a way, the landscape reminds me a bit of northern Dalarna in Sweden, with its mountains and fields.

Of course, any similarity to Scandinavia is superficial. The Scandic mountain range is old and geologically inactive; Hokkaido, like most of Japan, is young and still very active, with hot springs, gas vents, earthquakes and calderas. New volcanic eruptions are possible and likely inevitable. The mountains and the three lakes are all the result of relatively recent seismic activity.

The trip to the area is by a small two-car, then one-car train (the kind called "rälsbuss", "rail bus" in Swedish). From what I understand the tourist high season is in summer, with swimming, canoeing, bicycling and general frolicking around the lakes; but even in the dead of winter was the train pretty much packed with people going to Akan or towards Shiretoko national park on the north-eastern tip of the island. JR also runs a couple of old-style tourist trains along the coast, a diesel train and an old steam train; on the way back we took the green-painted Norokko train, with wood stove-heated cars and amazing view of the coastline. Fun, and arguably more comfortable than the rather stuffed rail bus.

To the left, the rail bus during a smoking break (not kidding). To the right, the Norokko train.

Our reason for choosing Akan wasn't the area itself, beautiful as it is, but that one of Ritsuko's friends runs a youth hostel there with his family. The Kussharo Genya hostel (more information on the Japanese site) is located right in the middle of the park, in between the three lakes. It is a fairly original octagonal design, with a round main room, major areas (kitchen, dining room, baths and so on) radiating out on the first floor, and the guest rooms spread out around the second. The place actually works more like a wilderness hotel than a normal hostel, offering various tours and guided sightseeing. Also unlike most normal hostels in Europe there is no guest kitchen but breakfast is included and you can order dinner. The dinner, by the way, is a multi-course menu I can't recommend warmly enough. Kazuhito is a trained chef from Osaka and worked in traditional Kyoto restaurants before he relocating in Sapporo and on to Akan to build the hostel. As a result the food, as you can imagine, is excellent.

The Kussharo Genya hostel.

The hostel interior, with its high-ceilinged main room. Yes, that is me relaxing after dinner in the center, and Ritsuko is in both the left and right images.

During winter there's plenty of cross-country skiing of course (the hostel will happily lend you gear); you can go for outdoor hot spring baths; and there's tours to the lakes and other scenic areas. But if you're lucky with the weather - and you're likely to at this time of year - the single most enjoyable thing you can do is simply to go for long walks in the snow-white sparkly landscape and soak in the hot-spring bath in the hostel. The area is criss-crossed with small, well-maintained roads and the nearest lake, Kussharo, is only a few kilometers away by foot. We went on a car tour to Mashu and Kussharo lakes the first day, but apart from that we simply spent our time enjoying the winter weather, not doing anything at all.

Lake Mashu. It's a caldera with steep cliffs and no natural beaches. And as it's a protected area no construction is allowed so there is no access to the lake itself; the closest you get is two view points around the lake.

Kussharo lake is easier to access than lake Mashu. It's still volcanic, though; the lack of ice near the shore is due to hot water and gases percolating up from beneath the sandy bottom around the beach. The swans evidently appreciate the warm water a great deal too.

A farmhouse with corn hanging to dry; and a couple of sulphur vents.

The flights both from and to Osaka were near-full and the airport was crowded. The hotels in Abashiri were alve with people and when we booked the Aurora icebreaker tour three months earlier most trips were already sold out. The train to Akan was standing room only both coming and going. The hostel was just about fully booked, with a group of Australians, several single Japanese travellers (this is very common) and, well, us. lake Mashu had more tourist buses and their occupants than you can shake a stick at, and at the shore of lake Kussharo the main problem was to find a vantage point that wouldn't frame a fellow photographer when you tried to shoot the gathering birds.

And yet, many of the few shops and restaurants in the area were closed for winter or permanently. JR will apparently no longer run the train to Mashu station, stopping earlier on the line. I kind of wonder why the area doesn't seem to be able to live on the kind of visitor interest that evidently exists. This level of interest is probably as good as it gets. I suspect the train service and other businesses are still largely meant to support the local agricultural business, not tourism, and this reflects the state of the former industry rather than the latter.

A final observation at the airport: Two years ago, a Hokkaido manufacturer of cookies and pastries was caught cheating with best-before labelling on "Shiroi Koibito" cookies. Unlike many other companies, they reacted quickly and decisively, withdrawing the product until they'd completely revamped their business procedures. "Shiroi Koibito" vaulted into the public conciousness, and now the company can't produce enough to meet demand from Hokkaido tourists looking for omiyage. The airport had throngs of passengers roaming from store to store looking for them.

Fun trip. We'll be back; next time perhaps in summer. More pictures in my Akan photoset.