Hokkaido is Japan untamed. It can be said about the rest of Japan that cities dominate the countryside; not so in Hokkaido. Its cities and towns are outposts of modern urban humanity that wild mountains, virgin forests, sapphire lakes, and surf-beaten shores keep at bay. Hokkaido is Japans last frontier, and the attitudes of the inhabitants are akin to those of the pioneers of the American West or any other last places.

• History
• People
• Culture
• Tourists
• Geography

History

It is no small mark of its remoteness that Hokkaido was not even mentioned in books until the 7th century. Then for the next millennium it was written off as the place of the hairy Ainu. The Ainu, indigenous inhabitants of Japan; possibly related to ethnic groups that populated Siberia; were always thought of as the inferior race by the Yamato Japanese, who arrived in Japan from the south via Kyushu and founded Japans imperial house. As the Yamato spread and expanded their empire from Kyushu through Honshu, the peace-loving Ainu retreated north to Hokkaido. There they lived, supporting themselves with their traditional pursuits of hunting and fishing. By the 16th century the Yamato had established themselves in the southern tip of Hokkaido, and they soon began to make incursions into the islands interior.

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People

With the Meiji Restoration in 1868, Japan changed its policy toward Hokkaido and opened it up as the new frontier to be colonized by the Yamato Japanese. The Tokyo government encouraged immigration from the rest of Japan but made no provision for the Ainu people. Indeed, the Ainu were given no choice but to assimilate themselves into the life and culture of the colonizers. Consequently, Ainu culture went into a sudden and near-terminal decline. It has been fashionable for academics in the 20th century to write them off as a doomed or even extinct race. It should be noted, however, that in recent years there has been something of a revival in Ainu culture and activism. The number of full-blooded Ainu might be very small, but 24,000 people believe themselves to possess enough of the bloodline to have officially declared themselves Ainu. Similarly, though the Ainu language has virtually disappeared as a native tongue, many people have begun to study it in a burgeoning number of college and evening courses. Ainu activism, meanwhile, received a boost when the United Nations made 1993 a Year of Indigenous Peoples, and the Ainu scored a propaganda victory in 1994 when their leading activist, Shigeru Kayano, was elected to Japans House of Councilors; the first Ainu to reach such a prominent position. In May 1997, the national government passed belated legislation recognizing Ainu culture. Sadly, little of this may be obvious to tourists who head for Hokkaido's (reconstructed) Ainu villages, many of which are tourist traps making money for Japanese entrepreneurs rather than for the Ainu themselves; these can be depressing places indeed.

The Ainu are not the only Japanese aborigines. Another race, the Moyoro, lived before the Ainu, but little is known about this mysterious people. Anthropological evidence found in the Moyoro Shell Mound on Hokkaido's east coast, now displayed in the Abashiri Museum, supports the belief that Moyoro civilization came to an end in the 9th century.

One of the delights of traveling through Hokkaido is meeting the people, who are known as Dosanko, after the sturdy draft horse introduced to the north. Since virtually all of the Japanese on this island are immigrants to a new frontier, there is less emphasis placed on honoring tradition than there is on accomplishing the matter at hand. Dosanko are still very Japanese, sharing the same culture as the rest of Japan, but they are also open to new customs and other cultures. They have a great attachment to their island. In a 1993 survey conducted by the Yomiuri Shimbun (newspaper) to find out how positively the Japanese felt about their home prefectures, Hokkaido received the most impressive score.

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Culture

Hokkaido as we know it was born during the Meiji Restoration (1868-1912), a time when the Japanese government turned to the West for new ideas. This island especially sought advice from America and Europe for its development. In the 1870s, some 63 foreign experts came here, including an American architect who designed the prefectures principal city, Sapporo. Around the same time, agricultural experts from abroad were brought in to introduce dry-farming as a substitute for rice, which could not grow in the severe winter climate until hardy varieties were developed much later. This has left Dosanko with a peculiar fondness for Europeans. In Sapporo, Westerners are warmly received. In the countryside, Dosanko are shy, but hardly timid, in coming to the aid of Westerners.

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Tourists

Because Hokkaido consists more of countryside than of cities, which implies language barriers that are more often than not bridged by the friendliness of locals; the number of gai-jin to come here has traditionally been small, compared to the many Japanese who come for winter skiing and summer hiking. At the same time, ongoing refurbishment's at Sapporo's Chitose Airport have opened up the island to more international flights (from such places as Hong Kong and Honolulu), which in turn have brought more people. Because Hokkaido is Japans northernmost and least developed island, it is easy to romanticize it as a largely uncharted territory. That is mostly untrue, as road and rail networks crisscross Hokkaido. Of course, wild beauty and open space still abound from volcanic mountains and lakes to the marshlands of the red-crested tancho-zuru (Japanese crane) to the ice floes of the Ohotsuku-kai (Sea of Okhotsk) to the northerly isolation of Rishiri and Rebun islands.

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Geography

With little visible past and newly born cities, Hokkaido will provide a respite from the temples, shrines, and castles that populate itineraries in the rest of Japan. The island is a geological wonderland: Lava-seared mountains hide deeply carved ravines; hot springs, gushers, and steaming mud pools boil out of the ground; and crystal-clear caldera lakes fill the seemingly bottomless cones of volcanoes. Half of Hokkaido is covered in forests. Wild, rugged coastlines hold back the sea, and all around the prefecture, islands surface offshore. Some are volcanic peaks poking their cones out of the ocean, and others were formed eons ago by the crunching of the earth crust. The remnants of Hokkaido's bear population, believed to number about 2,000, still roam the forests, snagging rabbits and scooping up fish from mountain streams, and deer wander the pastures, stealing fodder from cows. Hokkaido's native crane, the tancho, is especially magnificent, with a red-cap head and white body trimmed with black feathers. Look for it on the 1,000-yen note and in the marshes of Kushiro, east of Sapporo on the pacific coast.

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