The Ruins of Hokkaido

Why does the scenery of depopulation affect me differently in Hokkaido than the rest of Japan?

Welcome to my new subscribers, who must be wondering, wasn’t this supposed to be a regular newsletter? Long story short, I took on too much work over the past few months, traveled back to the states, and was anguishing over writing an essay and book chapter in Japanese in September. But my intention has always been to start posting regularly, and I think I’ve reclaimed the necessary mental space. I have a couple of interesting things in store in the next few weeks. For now, some thoughts on some recent travel.

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This summer, my partner and I spent a week journeying around eastern Hokkaido. Flying into Kushiro, the island’s easternmost big city (pop. 163,000), we rented a car for four days to explore the countryside and national parks in the triangle between Kushiro, Abashiri on the Okhotsk Sea, and Obihiro further to the southwest, before hopping a train to Sapporo, Japan’s fifth-biggest metro (2.4 million) and home to almost 50% of the island’s population.

It was my first time in Hokkaido in more than ten years, and my first time ever in the east. It made me appreciate why many Tokyoites go there for vacation—the wide-open skies feel liberating, and the landscape downright like the American West—a mixture of the forests of Oregon (complete with some nice stratovolcanoes), the horse and cow-filled pastures of Idaho, and the sprawling, mechanized farms of Iowa.

Country roads, take me home

There is something genuinely disorienting about still being in Japan but seeing farm houses sitting alone along arrow-straight roads that stretch to the horizon, or crossing the Tokachi plain by hopscotching across a rectangular grid plotted and numerically labeled with Cartesian regularity. In the rest of rural Japan, the sky is usually hemmed in by the steep walls of a narrow valley, roads and rice paddies laid out according to the natural sway of a river or ridge, the houses clustered into villages that are themselves oftentimes scrunched up at the foot of the hills. Hokkaido is the New World, modern Japan’s first experiment in colonization.

What are my coordinates?

Hokkaido feels like the American West because it was designed to emulate it. The American advisor William Clark arrived for a year in 1876 to instill the new government’s administrators with some American frontier spirit (“Boys, be ambitious!” goes his famous farewell). Over the late 19th century and 20th century, the island came to resemble its American model in terms of industrial and agricultural policy, urban planning (Sapporo feels like Denver), and the zeal for opening up the frontier via railroads, which extended into dozens of remote valleys until they were finally put on the chopping block after the 1980s.

Hokkaido’s railroads ca. 1949

When I first arrived in Tokyo, I studied under an elderly rural geographer at Waseda University. In his lectures, he would show us slide after slide of settlements deep in the mountains of regions across Japan, with rice paddies carved high onto hillsides, sometimes watered by absurdly long irrigation systems. His point was about the homogenizing drive in Japanese culture: that well into the latter half of the 20th century, people living as far north as Tohoku would sometimes go to unreasonable lengths to replicate a mode of life centered on rice cultivation that has been practiced in the country’s cultural heartland for more than a thousand years. Even in cold climates, there were few architectural adaptations like the ondol floor heating common in Korea.

“Hokkaido is different,” he said. People insulate their homes, live far apart from one another, and practice large-scale agriculture suitable to the climate. Whereas people in most of Japan tend to stubbornly hold onto land, a farmer in Hokkaido who can no longer turn a profit will sell to his neighbor and move to the city like an American. It is a settler society at its core, with the rationalist mindset that entails.

Hokkaido’s period of extensive development has long since come to an end, and the island now faces the same unipolar concentration as Japan as a whole—like Tokyo, Sapporo swallows up all the young people and economic activity, with the population on the rest of the island rapidly shriveling. This means Hokkaido is now strewn with ruins.

In town after town, I found myself stopping to examine the ruined shells of roadside cafes and community centers, houses and barns, railroad bridges and stations, hotels and factories. I spend a lot of time thinking about and visiting depopulating places across Japan, but something about the scenery here felt different—it didn’t move me toward melancholy in the same way as hyper-aged Akita might, or inspire me to imagine the possibilities for revival of the boarded-up buildings like in Setouchi…it reminded me of passing through mining-era ghost towns back home.

These kinds of ruins are not really my thing. Some enthusiasts love the creepy spectacle of civilization decaying, and travel all over Japan to explore haikyo—gutted hotels, factories, mines, or the UNESCO World Heritage Battleship Island in Nagasaki. In Hokkaido, I came to appreciate this haikyo mania website where they catalog information and photos as a useful resource for identifying some of the places I passed.

My interest in akiya (vacant buildings) might seem related to haikyo mania, but it is really something different entirely. Akiya are no longer quite real estate, not yet entirely ruins; these spaces are suspended in a transitory state, where a creative horizon leads towards the margins of capitalism, or simply towards some form of communal reuse. Ruins may be aesthetically pleasing to certain eyes, historically significant, literarily poignant, but they have reached the end of the road in terms of their social value. In most of Japan, ruins often make me mourn something about a place’s final disappearance, but in Hokkaido, I found myself unfazed by the receding human landscape.

In one town to the west of Lake Mashu, the main highway was lined by a dozen 1960s or 1970s-era hot spring hotels that, save for one or two, were abandoned and overgrown. Across from one of the last holdouts, an old man stood in front of his gift shop selling Western-style animal figures carved from wood. Next door, the charred remains of a recently burned-down building remained untouched, presumably neither the owner or government inclined to clean it up.

Just a few minutes further down the wooded road, we neared the shore of a big lake, and through the trees I spotted the construction site of a sprawling resort hotel. It all felt vaguely like Colorado to me—the old railroad town fades away, while urban tourists in SUVs will pay a pretty penny to own fancy second homes and soak in secluded springs along the lakeshore. Nowadays Niseko is being transformed into the Vail of Asia.

In creation as well as ruination, the landscape of Hokkaido, like America, is a space that feels fundamentally modern in both organization and conception. There is just capitalism and nature, no residual cultural or historical strata in between. The shinto shrines plopped down at the center of the towns read only as symbols of the colonizing imperial state, not as connections back to some pre-modern view of the natural world.

The disappearance of communities in rural Honshu, Shikoku, and Kyushu can feel at some level like a more notable loss because their roots stretch much further back, though at this point life in rural Japan has been thoroughly modernized for around two generations.

Does that make an attraction to satoyama landscapes or traditional houses or the vacant shopping streets of little fishing towns just a reflection of the gaze of a tourist or nomadic class able to eschew the Aeon (think Walmart) malls on the edge of every town for places and experiences that feel more “authentic”? Perhaps there’s little real difference now between Hokkaido and the rest of Japan, and you can chalk my predilections up to the acquired nostalgia of a foreigner from a land with no connection to its premodern past.

There is another layer of ruins in Hokkaido that is reminiscent of the American West, and that is the feeling that the original cultural connections to the land have been severed through the erasure of Ainu culture. I carried along a book of Ainu epic songs transliterated into Japanese in the 1920s, which I read with my morning coffee while camping on the shore of Lake Kussharo (Mouth Where the Marshy Water Drains—one difference between Hokkaido and the American West: most place names are derived from Ainu). The yukar are playful stories of people, gods, and animals tricking and taunting each other, killing and being killed amid the cosmos of the great wild. Reading them elicits some sadness at how in the blink of two human lifetimes modernity has erased their world so thoroughly and brought us to a moment in which the natural underpinnings of everything we know are now changing faster than we can adapt. They made me look out into the blue of distance, think of the next century of population decline, and feel content to let all the concrete crumble and return to whence it came.