An Ode to the Snow Country: Hokkaido
This post is part of the subscriber archive of Letters from Japan, my monthly Japan travel newsletter. A free preview is available below.
Good afternoon, and a belated Happy New Year.
Despite all that is going on in the world, I hope the new year brings us all some level of personal peace and things to look forward to.
This is the first Letter from Japan of the year, delivered to you from windy Tokyo, which feels much colder than usual this winter, raising my hopes that we might see some actual snowfall, not the usual slashy kind, this year. If that relatively rare event happens, I will make sure to cover it in one of the future newsletters. But before that, this month, I bring you snow, lots of it, complete with icy waterfalls, from somewhere else: the northern country, otherwise known as the Savage Island or more descriptively as Hokkaido.
What took me to −10 °C Hokkaido this time, right after a grueling 13-hour flight back to Tokyo from Istanbul, was, among several other tangible and intangible reasons (all outlined below), the need to escape the depressive mood that hangs over Tokyo in the first few days of the new year, a city I otherwise find surprisingly soothing, despite its size.
Most people leave town or stay home with their families; all the museums and shops, including grocery stores, close; and streets outside the temple areas become ghostly empty, testing the limits of even the most introverted among us, including me. To make things worse, there is also always invitingly deceptive sunshine and blue skies, which create a Pluribus-like anxiety, with all the possibilities outside, yet something deeply missing. While this all on paper sounds like a good excuse to relax at home and indulge in endless streaming, reading, or itinerary planning before getting back to work, I had never managed to make good use of that time in the past.
So instead of kicking off the new year in an uninspired mood in Tokyo, I now spend those first few days in a tiny town called Biei, located in central Hokkaido.
The town offers the perfect antidote to the depressive mood of Tokyo: a cozy hotel, a few restaurants that gracefully remain open even on the first few days of the new year, a web of easily walkable country roads surrounding the town and cutting through endless snow fields, and, more importantly, perfectly calibrated street lighting that Edward Hopper would approve of – adding a great deal of charm to the town`s often empty streets. There is still a sense of solitude, but an impressively deep and pleasurable one, and one that comes with one of the most distinctive winter landscapes one can find.
More from the subscriber archive:
Hiking Kumano Kodo: the Nakahechi Route
Hiking Japan: From Okinawa to Hokkaido
Shibu Onsen and the Snow Monkeys of Nagano
Tohoku Onsen Hopping: Four Nights, Four Hot Springs
Tokyo Eateries: the Non-Gourmet Version
Autumn Colors Trip to Aomori: Itinerary Suggestion
Cycling the Shimanami Kaido in Two Days
Japan Trip Planning Q&A Series (three posts)
Winter Trip to Biei in Hokkaido (four posts)
Walking the Goto Islands (eight posts)
For more Japan travel stories and resources, Letters from Japan includes a new monthly letter as well as a growing paid archive of travel diaries, walking itineraries, and trip-planning resources. Paid subscriptions are USD 5/month or USD 50/year (which includes a one-to-one trip-planning session). Explore the full archive here or subscribe below.
Letters from Japan:
