We spent our last day and a half in Hokkaido in Sapporo to learn more about the city’s early days. This was the least structured part of our eight-day visit as we came in without hard Sapporo plans but looking…
Hokkaido’s Pioneer Village: Kaitaku no Mura (Historic Village of Hokkaido)
Hidden in the trees just outside Sapporo is a frontier town surrounded by farms and a fishing village. These 52 buildings are not a functioning town but rather an architectural open-air museum that tells the story of Hokkaido’s pioneering past:…
Asahikawa’s Soldier-Farmers and Ainu
Asahikawa is the second largest city in Hokkaido, but 150 years ago it was an Ainu village along the Ishikari River in a mountain-encircled plain. Later a settlement of farmer-soldiers was established and this little gunto (garrison town) developed into…
Walking Yokohama’s Foreign Quarter
In 1854, Commodore Matthew Perry sat down with representatives of the Tokugawa Shogunate on a flat stretch of coastal land near a sleepy little fishing village called Yokohama. The Treaty of Peace and Amity agreed on at this meeting…
Red Star over Hokkaido: Sapporo Beer Museum
If there’s one place to grab a beer in Hokkaido, the Sapporo Beer Museum is it. The name “museum” makes it sounds like a place with the beer behind glass with little placards, but that’s pretty far from the truth.…
Evangelion and Japanese Swords Exhibition Opens in Sasebo
Bringing together two unique Japanese art forms, anime and traditional sword-making, the Evangelion and Japanese Swords exhibition opened at the Sasebo City Museum Shimanose Art Center on Apr. 13, 2019. This long-running, traveling exhibition has about 20 unique blades created…
Hanami in Hiroshima
Sakura, that quintessentially Japanese flower that blooms but for a short time then fades away on the wind, can draw crowds to even the most humble city park or riverside to enjoy their beauty, but when paired with some of…
Where the Rails Met the Sea: Otaru
It had taken nearly seven hours but we made it. The first express train took us from Abashiri on Hokkaido’s far northern coast through five hours of its national park-like interior of forests and plains, or at least that’s what…
Unzen Kanoukaen: Samurai and Sakura Blossoms by Torchlight
Hundred of burning torches moved as a river of flames advancing through the black near-moonless night. Under glowing torchlight a hundred samurai in full armor, sword at the hip, their faces and armor illuminated by only their burning fires proceeded…
Doing Hard Time in Abashiri: Abashiri Prison Museum
This story begins not with a prison but a road. Hokkaido is Japan’s Alaska and Old West combined. In the 1800s this massive, harsh land was sparsely populated and rich in resources waiting to be exploited. Japan needed pioneers to…