Places I love: Hokkaido
Hokkaido is a place I’ve wanted to visit for the past ~30 years but just managed to visit in 2022 for the first time. It’s probably the first place I’ve ever visited and fell in love with immediately (I was actually pretty ambivalent or even generally negative about Las Vegas, Austin, New York, Miami, Montreal, … the first time I visited each of them long ago.)
The history of Hokkaido itself is really interesting — the Ainu, the northern Samurai in Tohoku, the interplay of the northern Japanese tribes with Siberian tribes and the later Russian empire, etc. I didn’t really see too much of this myself; mostly I was in very Japanese touristy areas and mostly focused on the history of the 1800s/1900s, cat cafes, food, and general modern Japanese life.
The biggest city in Hokkaido, Sapporo, is where I spent most of my visit. I took a Shinkansen (high-speed bullet train) from Tokyo to Sapporo, although it’s only a Shinkansen to a city on the south of Hokkaido at Shin-Hakodate-Hokuto, where you transfer to a local train (which takes the same amount of time to go only about 1/6 the distance. There is also an airport near Sapporo (Chitose, CTS), and the HND-CTS route from Tokyo is one of the busiest air corridors in the world. The train was fun, but took 6-8 hours, so if I were connecting from an international flight, I’d definitely connect by plane, and even if I were starting in Tokyo, flying would be an attractive option. Flying is often cheaper, too, especially if you are paying for tickets normally vs. using a tourist JR pass like I did.
The most striking thing for me was just how much Hokkaido overall looked like Pennsylvania and New England. Rural areas with wooden barns and other structures, trees with colored and dropped leaves (I visited in early November), preparations in architecture for snow (lots of salt/sand buckets, textured pavement, covered walkways and shopping arcades), compared to what I thought of as “Japan” (mostly Tokyo-Osaka-Kyoto).
Food is almost certainly the best thing about Hokkaido. What Japan is to the rest of the world (extreme authenticity and expertise in finding the best raw ingredients, autistic excellence in preparation), Hokkaido is to the rest of Japan. Seafood is probably the best category, especially crab, but Hokkaido also has an amazing dairy industry (something you would not expect for Japan or Asia generally), and one of my favorite foods in Hokkaido was simple soft-serve vanilla ice cream (“Hokkaido milk” being famous across Japan).
I could have an entirely pleasant 2-week visit to Hokkaido just going to the Sapporo train station and staying within the attached shopping malls. Japanese department stores have “food halls” in the basements which put modern Harrods and Selfridges to shame, plus there were many restaurants. Since Sapporo is an especially tourism-focused city, there were a lot of Chinese restaurants (including a Din Tai Fung branch!).
The best food I had was at various live/fresh seafood markets. You can point at a (large!) live crab (king crab, red crab, etc.), they’ll weigh it, cook it, and serve it. Usually this is the kind of thing you’d do with friends, but I was traveling solo (as usual), so I ate an entire large crab myself (which was maybe 50% too much food for me). I also went to a “crab set menu” place with a 15 course crab-based feast, including various types of crab sashimi, alcohol-treated crab, etc.
Aside from Sapporo, I also visited Otaru, a nearby smaller town which used to be a significant fishing and then banking capital of the North, but which had since become a quiet tourist-focused town on the water. Wonderful local cat cafe (where they spoke no English, but once they saw I was pretty experienced with cats, they relaxed, and the cats started climbing on me, etc.).
Probably the best time to visit is deep in winter (Snow Festival in early February, or the whole ski season), or in the summer. Shoulder seasons like when I visited were great due to lack of tourists/crowds (and covid travel restrictions had just been lifted, except for China which was still banned), and the JPY:USD rate was 150 (so everything was super cheap).
Hokkaido is on my to-visit-again list, but I’d also like to visit Southwestern Japan (I’ve basically only done Osaka, Kyoto, Tokyo, nearby towns, and the corridor up to Aomori and then parts of Hokkaido). I would seriously consider buying one of the cheap rural properties in northern Honshu or Hokkaido and living there a couple months a year in the future.