Hokkaido Honey

The Ainu called this island Ainu Mosir – the Land of Humans. They had lived here for thousands of years before any Japanese name existed for it, building settlements along the river systems, reading the salmon runs, following the bears. Their relationship with the land was organized around the concept of kamuy – spirit-deities present in everything: the bear (Kim-un-kamuy, god of the mountains), the salmon (Kamuy-cep, fish of the gods), the Blakiston’s fish owl (Kotan-kor-kamuy, god of the village). The fish owl is the world’s largest owl, a genuinely enormous bird that hunts salmon from riverbanks in the dark. The Ainu built their cosmology around what the landscape actually contained.

The Japanese knew this island as Ezo – a distant, cold, and sparsely settled edge of the empire. In 1869 the Meiji government renamed it Hokkaido (North Sea Road) and set about changing it. The project was systematic and fast. The Kaitakushi, or Development Commission, was established to attract settlers and open the land. Japan did not have the agricultural expertise to develop a sub-boreal island, so it went abroad. In 1871 the government hired 48 American experts, 17 European, and 13 Chinese advisors, paying for their knowledge the way Japan has always paid for knowledge it needs – seriously, and immediately. Horace Capron, formerly US President Grant’s agriculture commissioner, came to advise on Western farming methods. In 1876 William S. Clark arrived from Massachusetts to establish Sapporo Agricultural College. He stayed less than a year. His parting words – “Boys, be ambitious!” (少年よ大志を抱け) – became the unofficial motto of the island. The college eventually became Hokkaido University, and Clark’s phrase is still quoted freely.

The advisors brought what they knew from home: American Midwest and northern European farming, grid-plan city design, barley, hops, and dairy. Sapporo was laid out on a strict grid with wide boulevards and a central park – more Milwaukee than Kyoto – which is why it feels different from any other Japanese city of comparable size. Hokkaido University’s red brick buildings look like a New England campus dropped into a northern forest. The first brewery opened in 1876, in the same year as the agricultural college, because hops grew wild along the railway lines and barley grew in the cold fields – and Sapporo Beer became one of Japan’s most famous brands from a city that was barely a decade old.

The people who came to settle were not the established families of Kyoto or Osaka with centuries of custom and obligation behind them. They came from everywhere, with nothing to lose and land to break. This shapes how Hokkaido residents are still described – open to outsiders, pragmatic, unburdened by the elaborate social hierarchies that govern interaction elsewhere in Japan. There is a regional personality concept in Japanese called kenminsei, the character of a prefecture’s people. Hokkaido’s kenminsei is notably direct. It is one of the few places in Japan where going Dutch at a wedding is considered unremarkable.

Hokkaido covers 83,000 square kilometers – about the size of Austria – and holds just over five million people. Outside Sapporo, the population density drops fast. The city is genuine: 1.96 million people, Japan’s fifth largest, with a functioning subway, a serious food scene, and the Sapporo Snow Festival in February that draws tourists from across Japan and East Asia to watch enormous snow sculptures built in Odori Park. Summer is better for the rest of the island. The humidity that makes the rest of Japan difficult in July barely reaches here.

The island divides roughly into four zones. The Sapporo area offers urban life and easy access. Southern Hokkaido – centered on Hakodate, the historic port city that was one of Japan’s first to open to Western trade in the 1850s – has a distinctive mix of Japanese and Western Meiji-era architecture, a star-shaped fort called Goryokaku, and a seafood morning market that many visitors rank among the best in Japan. Central Hokkaido contains Daisetsuzan, Japan’s largest national park: volcanic peaks, gorges, alpine wildflowers, and hot spring villages. The Furano and Biei plateau below it turns purple with lavender in July. Eastern Hokkaido is the remote part: Kushiro’s wetlands (Japan’s largest, home to the red-crowned crane), Lake Akan with its Ainu settlement and the peculiar spherical algae called marimo, Lake Mashu which the Ainu called the lake of the gods, and the Shiretoko Peninsula – a UNESCO World Heritage Site where brown bears fish for salmon in rivers that also carry the occasional tourist raft.

Niseko, in the southwest, has become one of the world’s best-known ski resorts, drawing international visitors at volumes unusual for Japan. The powder snow has a specific quality – cold enough and light enough to be genuinely different from anything in the Alps or the Rockies. Winter visitors to the ski towns sometimes do not realize they have barely seen Hokkaido.

The food is the other thing. Hokkaido produces about 25 percent of Japan’s agricultural output. Dairy means something specific here – approximately half of Japan’s milk comes from Hokkaido, and the butter and cream in Japan’s food supply originate largely from these pastures. The ramen is distinct in each city: Sapporo’s miso broth with curly noodles and a pat of butter on top, Hakodate’s clear salt broth, Asahikawa’s soy-based fat-forward version. Jingisukan – grilled mutton cooked on a dome-shaped convex grill, named after Genghis Khan in a story nobody can reliably trace – is the emblematic local meat dish, eaten in beer halls with Sapporo lager and a quantity of vegetables. The seafood argument involves crab, sea urchin from Rishiri and Rebun islands, scallops, salmon, and ikura. Yubari melons, grown in one town in central Hokkaido, reach prices at auction that make international news.

Below all of this, the Ainu foundation is being actively recovered. The Upopoy National Ainu Museum opened at Lake Poroto in 2020 – the most significant institutional investment in Ainu culture in Japanese history. Japan officially recognized the Ainu as indigenous in 2008, reversing an 1899 declaration. Kayano Shigeru, who documented the language and culture for most of his adult life and became the first Ainu member of parliament in 1994, is commemorated in Nibutani. The language is critically endangered – fluent first-language speakers number in the dozens – but revitalization programs are active. Place names across Hokkaido remain Ainu: Sapporo itself comes from sat-poro-pet, meaning dry, large river.

The ecology that makes Hokkaido distinct – sub-boreal forests, genuine wilderness, cold that extends late into spring – is the same ecology that produces the honeys documented here. The beekeeping families who travel from southern Kyushu to harvest in Hokkaido every August are following the same river valleys the Ainu followed for salmon. Different purpose, same landscape.