October 19-29, 2023

We’ve been trying to get to Japan to visit our friend Kevin for a long time, but the pandemic threw a big wrench in those gears. Every time we tried to make a plan, something got in the way, whether it was work obligations or the Japanese government refusing to admit tourists after virtually every other country on Earth had opened their borders back up. Kirb’s trip to Tokyo in 2010 was his first solo international adventure; how different would the experience seem now with so much more travel experience under our belts? Mazz had never been to any Asian country. For a while it seemed like this trip was going to fall through as well, but after bailing on Japan so many times in the past we made it a priority and bought some very long flights to the other side of the world.

It’s custom in Japan to bring a gift when you visit someone, so we brought Kevin something he simply can’t get: that good good unpasteurized French cheese and butter. After visiting our favorite shop Alte Milch and picking out a tupperware full of goods, we expected our dairy delivery to be borderline - if not fully - illegal. We were pleased then to find that if you bring it along in your carry on, Japan doesn’t particularly care about cheese, only meat and veggies. To prepare our bodies for the trip, we tried out an app called Timeshifter that tells you when to avoid light and go to bed for several days leading up to your flight. Once on the plane, the app gave the very reasonable and feasible directive to put on an eye mask at 4pm and go to sleep for ten hours straight. Sitting mostly awake in pitch black for almost the entirety of an international flight was a strange experience, but it did indeed help train our bodies to a new time zone.

Picking out some choice cheeses at Alte Milch to smuggle into Japan

Peach and Daisy welcome us to the Mushroom Kingdom

As we’ve stated before, we’re not exactly “city people”. We like a little bit of time in dense metropolises but tend to get bored there quickly. In general, we prefer to play around outside. But Tokyo isn’t just any old city - it is quite literally the biggest city in the entire world. With over 37 million inhabitants, it’s four times the size of New York, with almost ten million more people than Dehli, the second largest city. If you get bored in Tokyo, you’re the issue. So, we split the trip into city time and country time, spending two weekends in Tokyo and the days inbetween in Hokkaido, the mountainous island in the north.

The Big City

One big difference between this trip and Kirb’s first visit in 2010 is how much translation technology has improved on phones. On his previous trip, Kirb was relegated to Wifi and didn’t have any way to understand the written Japanese alphabet. Once we disembarked the plane, it took mere minutes to install data e-sims on our phones that gave us access to google lens, which lets you use your camera to instantly translate anything you see. In 2010, the process of meeting Kevin in Shinjuku station - the busiest train station in the world - was anxiety inducing. Kirb asked a stranger on the train to help decipher the instructions and the man ended up getting off the train himself to guide Kirb personally to the meetup spot, even though it wasn’t his stop (Japanese people can be mind-bogglingly helpful and polite). This time, it was no issue at all to switch trains on the other side of town and then track down our friend among the tens of thousands inside Shinjuku station.

Kevin had told us that this was a particularly great time to visit Japan. The government decided not to significantly adjust the value of the yen for inflation in the last few years, keeping the prices of everyday items affordable for the populous. After stopping for lunch at a cute little spot in Kevin’s neighborhood and finding that the tuna sashimi bowl with soup and sides cost less than €5, we could hardly believe it. Eating and drinking out was decidedly not cheap in 2010; now the prices felt almost frivolous.

Finally, we’ve made it to our beloved Kevvy

A simple, delicious spread that costs less than €5. Our excitement levels rise

And so we began to meander around the biggest city in the world, moving from neighborhood to neighborhood, taking in the spectacle and figuring out what to eat next. We started day 1 in Meidaimae, where Kevin graciously let us borrow his studio apartment. Next, we moved on to the hip neighborhood of Yoyogi, filled with chic bistro restaurants serving the same European natural wines one would surely find at upscale eateries in Berlin.

Kevin’s wildly small but entirely functional studio in Meidaimae

Kirb gets used to some new currency. The yen is a good-looking bill!

Halloween is steadily becoming a new popular holiday in Japan and we found seemingly random displays celebrating it, like this one in Yoyogi

Funky Japanese architecture outisde of Shibuya

Like Germany, you can drink on the streets in Tokyo, and corner stores sell sake “juice boxes” for about 80 cents.

Yoyogi Park is home to one of the most popular shinto shrines in Tokyo, Meiji Jingu, dedicated to the deified spirits of Emperor Meiji and Empress Shōken. A wall of sake barrels line the path to the shrine, colorful decorations that also serve as symbols that unite the brewers with their gods. Enormous torii gates welcome visitors to the shrine, where you can buy amulets to ward off evils or buff up attributes like luck and love. Gorgeous Shinto shrines are situated all over Tokyo, and with any time spent wandering in parks or through residential neighborhoods you will inevitably stumble upon them.

A massive display of sake bottles inside the shrine

Shimenawa, or “enclosing ropes,” used for purification in the Shinto religion

Happy hour at the yakitori izakaya where drinks also cost about 80 cents

In our short time in this Shibuya restaurant a girl got drunk enough from 1 or 2 drinks that she began to sob uncontrollably at her table

Shibuya is the fashion neighborhood of Tokyo, thoroughly packed with pedestrians that clog the neon-lit streets. We’re both mallrats at heart, so we were happy to spend hours wandering through each level of Shibuya 109, discovering the newest trends in Japanese clothing, or Shibuya Parco, with its entire Cyberspace floor dedicated to video games, manga, and otaku.

Posing at Shibuya Scramble Square, where an estimated 1,000-2,500 people cross the intersection every two minutes

We give this business name an appreciative slow claup

What part of “Rockmorf Fambad” don’t you get?

Shimokitazawa is the curry capital of Tokyo, and when we showed up looking for lunch we found that the neighborhood was in the middle of a full-on curry festival. Every restaurant had lines out the door, so we chose one that looked promising and got in the queue. The brown curry with fried chicken cutlet that Kirb ordered was arguably the best thing he ate on the entire trip.

Neat lines of people on their phones, waiting patiently for the train

Getting off the subway, we find an entire pamphlet of different curry options for us to explore in Shimokitazawa

Queuing up in the line outside E-itou Curry

We all ordered different kinds and unanimously agreed that the traditional brown curry Kirb got was the winner

This neighborhood is also home to an incredible number of second-hand clothing shops, each of which almost exclusively sells American clothes from the 90s. It was actually a little disappointing to walk by shop after shop that only carried outfits we already owned as awkward tweens, but that era is back in full force, so who are we to fight it? There used to be a rail line that ran through the center of Shimokitazawa, but over the last few years it was removed and the neighborhood was given a glow-up. This newly-refreshed, modern area was home to boutique smell stores, vegan Chinese food, and even a shop that sold Pacina wine, the lovely Tuscan vineyard we visited back in 2021.

A Shimokitazawa side alley between bustling second-hand shops

At first, we made fun of the smell store. Then curiosity won out and we went inside and smelled things and bought two packs of really incredible incense

We like sake but don’t know too much about it, so we ordered different kinds to try at pretty much every restaurant we visited

Soba feast in Koenji. So many little dishes on the table!

The maneki-neko, or “beckoning cat,” is a symbol of good luck not just in Japan but all throughout Asia. The origins of this adorable icon are based in Tokyo at the Gotokuji Temple, where legend says that the samurai Ii Naotaka passed by in the 1600s and was beckoned by a cat at the temple gate. He followed the cat inside and narrowly escaped a thunderbolt that struck where he had been standing. The grounds of Gotokuji are gorgeous, but the real draw is the sprawling display of white and red maneki-neko statues collected here. Just down the street is the Setagaya Hachiman Shrine, which has origins dating back to 1091. Wrestling at this shrine is thought to be the origin of the sumo tournaments held for the Autumn Festival since the Edo period.

Unlike many others in Tokyo, the three-story pagoda at Gotokuji Temple survived American air raids during WWII and didn’t need to be rebuilt

The enormous graveyard inside the temple grounds house generations of Japanese nobility

Some of the thousands of beckoning cat figurines on display at the temple

“Visitors to the temple offer representations of this cat to a god or Buddha in an act of hono or ‘offering’, as this is believed to make wishes come true and bring good fortune to those who leave a Maneki Neko behind.”

An enormous torii gate on an otherwise normal residential street

The sumo ring, still in use since the Edo period

Here’s a weird thing about Tokyo: there are no public trash cans. There used to be, but a combination of residual fear from the sarin gas attacks of 1995 combined with a government claim during the pandemic that they were somehow unsafe led them all to be recently taken away. Somehow, Tokyo is not covered in trash. It is immaculate. We searched forever for a place to ditch some to-go coffee cups and found signs in subway bathrooms that instructed us to pack our trash out with us and throw it away at home. There are garbage bins all over our neighborhood in Berlin and yet the streets are covered in litter. We regularly watch people throw trash on the ground directly next to garbage bins. There is a culture of respect in Japan that is truly foreign to the western world. Also unlike Berlin, there are public toilets everywhere in Tokyo. You are never far away from a usable restroom. Trying to find a bathroom in Berlin feels almost punitive. What a relief.

If this sign was displayed in Berlin someone would have immediately crumpled it up and thrown it in the urinal along with some trash they brought *from* home

There is an entire “Ramen Street” beneath Tokyo station so obviously we had to go there,

This shoyu ramen with soy-sauce-preserved egg was really fantastic

We wanted to see the Imperial Palace and spent a good chunk of a day on subways making our way there only to find that it was closed on Fridays and google hadn’t bothered to let us know. Which is a shame, because it looked real nice on the other side of that moat. Still, the surrounding Kokyo Gaien National Garden was great for a conciliatory stroll, filled solely with a forest of perfectly-manicured Kuromatsu pine trees and unspoiled turf.

Peeking at the Imperial Palace from across the moat

The fanciest meal we ate on the trip was at Nijimi, a new, upscale izakaya in the Shoin-jinja-mae neighborhood. Here we got incredible omakase sashimi, grilled mackerel heads, and a much-needed tofu and sesame salad filled with fresh fruits and vegetables. Like many other places we’ve visited, restaurant food in Japan doesn’t offer quite the amount of roughage that we normally enjoy, so by this point in the trip, we were overly excited to eat a salad. We also enjoyed some truly nice sake here, not the juice boxes and jars of the stuff we’d been buying at the corner stores. We also got to try some Japanese natural wine, and while it was fine, we realized that we should focus on drinking the stuff that this culture excels at making, not their version of a thing we like at home.

In particular, the sake we got at Nijimi felt the most “next-level” compared to the other food and drink we’d enjoyed in Japan

Right after our fancy meal, we head to another restaurant for more food and drinks with Kevin’s friend Shigeru

What just about every train looks like from 7pm until they stop running around midnight

Our big touristy outing for the trip was to visit TeamLab Planets, a huge, interactive art exhibit in its own permanent warehouse.

“People go barefoot and immerse their entire bodies in the vast artworks together with others. The artworks change under the presence of people, blurring the perception of boundaries between the self and the works. Other people also create change in the artworks, blurring the boundaries between themselves and the works, and creating a continuity between the self, the art, and others.”

The exhibit didn’t smell as strongly of feet as some online reviewers had complained

Expanding Three-Dimensional Existence in Transforming Space

Reading the reviews online, we knew to bring shorts, as several of the exhibits have you walk through water that goes up to your knees. TeamLab was fun, but not quite as impressive as we had hoped, and paired with the fact that it was out of the way of everything else we wanted to do, it ended up eating away most of the day. By the time we had lugged all our bags there and then up to the Ueno neighborhood for our final night in Tokyo, there wasn’t enough time to visit the capybara cafe that Kirb had been dreaming about. Kirb will always regret not being able to pet those capybaras.

This “three-dimensional mass of flowers” was definitely the highlight of TeamLabs

The flowers in the exhibit are real, air-growing orchids that raise and lower above a mirrored floor. It’s mesmerizing

We wish we would have had time to explore more of Ueno, as it had a stronger “classic Tokyo” vibe than other neighborhoods we visited. We were encouraged by our friend Josh to visit “every yokocho we could find,” and there was a huge one by Ueno station. Yokochos are old-fashioned drinking streets filled with bars and restaurants, often crammed in narrow alleys. Ueno Station has the Ameya Yokocho, or “Ameyoko,” with over 400 shops under the railway viaduct. On the walk there from our hotel, we passed through Ueno Park and found a Halloween Concert going on, as well as dozens of food stalls that almost became dinner before we even reached the yokocho. Unsurprisingly, this park was also home to a stunning shrine, Shinobazu-no-ike Bentendo, glowing in the night with dozens of paper lanterns.

Mazz decides to poison herself with just a lil bit of gluten to try some squid and shrimp okonomiyaki

It doesn’t matter where you go, the food is going to be good

Ueno yokocho is quite the scene on a Saturday night

Ameyoko was utterly packed with people on a Saturday night and it took several attempts before a restaurant allowed us to finally sit down and eat. We’d learned by now that it didn’t really matter where you ate in Tokyo, the food was probably going to be good, and that was the case for the random izakaya we chose. Yariki specialized in pork, and though we’re generally adventurous, we stuck with yakitori skewers of belly and cheek instead of intestine and liver.

Moving on, we found it surprisingly difficult to find a traditional bar that wasn’t also primarily a restaurant, wandering down neon streets for long periods of time. When we found ourselves in an area that was clearly some kind of red light district with women lined up outside in shabby anime costumes, we decided to move the search closer to our hotel. Back in Nezu, we inadvertently found an art gallery that was also a sake bar run by what appeared to be an old master, possibly a wizard. They were hosting a small event but seated us anyway, and when the man asked what kind of sake we liked, we simply showed him a picture of the bottle we had enjoyed best from our dinner at Nijimi. He returned with the best-tasting bottle of sake we had ever tasted, sweet and clean and deeply floral. Two servings of high-quality sake there cost €11. We realized we probably should have sought out the good stuff a little earlier in the trip.

Cucumber with miso is the only vegetable still in stock at the izakaya. Good combo, turns out!

A wizard pours us the best sake we have ever tasted

The Country

Hokkaido is the northernmost island in Japan, more isolated and rural than the mainland. The autumn changing of the leaves, or kōyō 紅葉, is a big event there, drawing the largest number of tourists of any season. From Tokyo, it’s a few hours by plane to reach New Chitose Airport, which sits about an hour by car outside of Sapporo. After a surprisingly charming breakfast of soba noodles in the Haneda airport, we picked up our rental car and headed to the nearest convenience store. There aren’t a ton of restaurants along the rural roads of Hokkaido, so for simple meals, convenience store fare was going to be a staple. Surprisingly, the onigiri rice triangles and pre-made sandwiches from Lawson proved to be not only cheap and fast but genuinely tasty. By this point in the trip, we had begun making allegiances to our favorite convenience stores. Kevin was partial to 7-11, but after that delicious katsu sandwich, Kirb was firmly a Lawson man.

Even the disposable coffee cups on the low-budget airline are adorable

This convenience store katsu sandwich was better than it had any right to be

Strangely, we had a personal connection in Hokkaido, though it was as tenuous as “connections” get. Back in his days as a music writer in Seattle, Kirb knew of an enigmatic songwriter named Kaz, a Japanese transplant who performed under the moniker POWERFUL PWR. A nimble guitarist, Kaz was exceptionally talented at self-promotion; it seemed he was on a new, notable bill every week. He also had a reputation as a wild man. Even if you didn’t know Kaz, you probably knew of him if you were a part of the late-2000s Seattle music scene. It was a mild surprise to learn that Kevin and Kaz were independently acquaintances through music, having toured together back in their band days. Now, Kaz is an elected official in Asahikawa and has helped Kevin set up multiple gigs in Hokkaido. Though his antics have died down with age, Kaz’s larger-than-life reputation has merely shifted. Now he’s well-known in the area for agitating far-right Japanese politicians, some of whom have become litigious for alleged character defamation.

Kaz is also something of a prolific landowner in Asahikawa, having bought and flipped over 20 buildings in the city. We were staying in one of those buildings, a largely-empty former office complex in the process of renovation. Our rooms were sparsely furnished with a single bed, a stack of thin futon mattresses, and a variety of mismatched office furniture. It was truly one of our stranger travel accommodations, but the price was right for a place to simply lay our heads after days of exploring. In the end, it would seem the lodging was actually free, as Kevin asked what we owed for the stay and Kaz simply never responded. We asked why Kevin hadn’t inquired about the cost beforehand, and he told us that you simply don’t talk about money like that in Japanese culture.

After getting settled in our new home office, Kaz took us to get yakiniku for dinner. The lively woman running the place seemed like she could barely be bothered with us as she brought plates of raw lamb and wagyu beef to grill at our table. We asked if we could take her picture as she mixed us together dishes of garlicky dipping sauce and she said she didn’t care; she claimed to have 20,000 followers on YouTube. Kirb and Kaz exchanged stories of Seattle’s not-so-distant past, filling in gaps of what had happened to mutual acquaintances over the years. The two never quite knew each other in Seattle, but they knew of each other, and the number of mutual friends between them was impressive. It was like catching up with an old friend you’ve never actually met.

Our strange, semi-abandoned office building lodging in Asahikawa

The next morning we tried the Hokkaido-specific convenience store, Seicomart, celebrated for their larger selection of hot, pre-made foods. Kevin had asked us before the trip if we were breakfast eaters and if so, what we liked, as Japanese breakfasts were often just some rice and fish. Kirb decided to try this at Seicomart, and while his tray of breaded salmon, sweet kelp, seaweed, egg, and rice was a new combination of breakfast flavors for him, it wasn’t necessarily something he’d choose to eat in the backseat of a car at 8am again.

Seicomart, the local Hokkaido chain of convenience stores

Fried fish, kelp, and seaweed for breakfast

Asahikawa was nicely situated as a base to explore Daisetsuzan National Park, which our research had led us to believe was the best option in Hokkaido for exploring the autumn landscape. It was strangely hard to get specific information about hikes online though, so we decided to simply find an information center and have a knowledgeable party tell us where to go. This tactic had always worked for us in the past. The drive between the airport and Asahikawa the day before had been surprisingly mundane, taking us through hours of strip-mall lined arterials and sparse farmland. For those of you from Seattle, it felt like driving on Aurora Ave for almost two hours. The drive out to Daisetsuzan let us know that we were now in a truly beautiful area, with bright red, orange, and yellow leaves blanketing the hillsides. We parked at the information center and found that it wasn’t open yet. Snow was lightly falling in the parking lot and the mountain ahead was dusted white. The map out front listed the Momijidani hike, and a little research online revealed that the 30-minute jaunt out to a waterfall was “one of the best trails to see the autumn leaves in Hokkaido.” We zipped up our warm jackets and hit the trail.

While the valley we had driven into was vibrantly colored with leaves, the Momijidani trail was filled instead with barren branches. Though it was likely gorgeous a few weeks before, now it was largely barren and particularly muddy and slippery. The visitor’s center was open when we returned and Kevin spoke with the woman at the front desk, telling her what sort of hike we were after. She explained that there weren’t really any more hikes in the area, as the gondola up the mountain was already closed for winter, but if we wanted, we could walk back down along the main road to the power plant. There were some pretty trees down there, apparently. As we left for the car, rain began to pour down, so we decided to leave the area behind. We drove by the power plan on the way out, confused as to how walking there on a main road could ever be considered a “hike.” We were surrounded by beautiful wooded countryside. Were there really no trails leading through it?

Beautiful autumn foliage leading up to the Momijidani hike

The forest behind the trail sign looks almost unnatural, like wallpaper

Smaller waterfalls leading up to the main falls, which had sunlight situated in a such a way that every photo came out terrible

Though the valley looked great, most of the autumn leaves had already fallen on the only actual hike in the area

“The Goblin’s Nose” situated on a hill in the distance

The only bear we actually saw in Hokkaido, though they were reported active in every outdoor area we visited

There was still a lot of day left, so we began the long drive to the other end of the park to visit the Fukiage open-air onsen. Hokkaido is a hotbed of geothermal activity, but the vast majority of the hot springs are operated by spas called “onsens,” which are gender-separated, all-nude paid bathing establishments. Fukiage is a natural outdoor hot spring that is maintained sporadically by volunteers, the only of its sort on this side of the island. Shirogane Blue Pond was on the way, and though Kevin had been there already, he claimed its unique blue water was worth another visit. Even on a cloudy day the pond had an incredible blue hue, though it was surrounded by tourists flowing in and out of buses. Unsurprisingly, once we walked even the slightest bit away from the main area we were all by ourselves on a trail and could appreciate the kōyō in peace.

There aren’t a lot of trails in Hokkaido, but when you do find one, there probably won’t be many other people on it

Though touristy, the beautiful blue waters of Shirogane were worth the stop

We followed google maps up some winding mountain roads, and with 7 minutes left in the drive, the way was blocked by a massive, unexpected metal barricade. We branched off and drove up to an observation tower, where a man explained to Kevin that the road to the onsen was closed for the winter. We could walk there in about an hour, either along the closed highway or on a snowy trail behind the building. It was already 3:00pm and the sun would set around 4:30, but Kirb in particular was determined. He wanted little more than to sit in a Japanese hot spring in the snowy mountains. So we zipped up our warm coats again and hit the frozen trail, bringing along photos of the maps from the observation tower to help ensure we wouldn’t get lost along the way. We made it about a half an hour, slipping and sliding in the snow as the sun started to set behind us, before Mazz protested that we were being stupid and dangerous and insisted we head back to the car. Kirb eventually begrudgingly accepted, but he really wanted to go to that hot spring.

The trail leading to Mount Tokachi and the Fukiage open-air onsen

Keep wandering into the snowy woods or head back to the car? Mazz was not a fan of walking on snow-covered boulders

Red trees stick out amongst the evergreens

Kaz was throwing a get-together in Asahikawa that evening. He had just bought an old building downtown and had invited friends there to drink and celebrate. We ate dinner at a quotidian sushi place next to our office park for dinner and found that though it wasn’t anything special compared to what we can get back home, it was refreshingly cheap. Numerous plates of fresh fish, tempura, and drinks for three cost €11 per person. We followed up our sushi with sake jars from the nearby Lawson to help warm us up on our brisk, 30-minute walk downtown. The local sakes were quite good, and we passed by the factory for our favorite kind on the way to Kaz’s new property.

Picking up some fun-size sake jars from the Lawson en-route to a weird party

Downtown Asahikawa was quaint but bustling with shops and restaurants. Nestled between those shops and restaurants was the strange old optometrist building that Kaz had bought. His friends were already inside pulling beers from a cooler and playing with the archaic equipment that littered the storefront. The first floor was cluttered with discarded machinery and sales displays, but the two floors above were utterly packed with decades of stuff. Kaz implored us to dig through the wreckage to our hearts’ content; the place had been abandoned for 6 years and all the junk inside had come with the purchase of the building. Surely, there was treasure buried somewhere in these stacks and stacks of boxes, and Kirb was going to find it. We spent hours excavating those strange ruins, returning regularly to the nearby Lawson to buy more sake, pee, and most importantly, wash our hands. Kaz let us keep whatever we found, and we left with a few treasures, specifically some tiny maneki-neko cat figurines that are sure to bring us good luck in the future. Kirb could have kept digging around that weird old building forever. He woke up the next morning with a sore throat that stung of decades-old dust.

Sure, this looks like a cool, totally normal place to hang out

Kaz’s friends help celebrate his newest purchase

We all agreed that if Kaz brought this vintage light-up optometry sign to Portland he could sell it for a fortune

Some antiquated machines to stick your eyes into

Endless boxes and piles to excavate on the second floor

Kaz unearths some vintage smut and snap-on sunglasses among the piles and piles of *stuff*

Some yuba gohan (fermented tofu skin) at Kaz’s friend’s tea shop to end the night: A traditional, carb-heavy snack perfect for soaking up the booze after drinking

The morning was bright and blue and the sprawling farmland around Asahikawa began to spring up with mountains as we made our way south to Furano. Cheese is something of a rarity in Japan - as evidenced by our choice of gift for Kevin - but he still insisted on stopping at the Furano Cheese Factory. We were easy to convince. Compared to what we’re used to eating in Europe, the cheese samples weren’t particularly tasty, but the building itself was gorgeous, nestled in sunlit yellow leaves.

A sprawling mountainous landscape in Kamifurano

We texted this image to Greg and he responded, “I’m imagining a bowl full of a delicious dashi broth, filled with beautiful curly locks of blonde hair”

Celebrating the benevolent cow at the Furano Cheese Factory

Even if the cheese wasn’t particularly great, the views at the factory were lovely

We stopped by the Furano Marche next, a permanent farmers’ market of sorts that sold local produce and souvenirs. Kirb was particularly enamored with the market’s illustrated mascot, a tomato chef surrounded by fresh vegetables. Kevin had pointed out early on in the trip that the Japanese people love creating adorable mascots to represent literally any sort of thing or idea. We found several good ones in Furano, like the taxi cabs sporting little grinning snowmen on their roofs. We stopped by the information center - which had some sort of mushroom torso man statue out front - and they told us that even though the area was surrounded by beautiful, forested hillsides, there weren’t any marked paths through them. There were some nice places to walk around closer to town, but two of them were currently closed due to bear sightings. In moderate disbelief, we checked her info against All Trails and found that sure enough, the only listed hikes in the area were grueling slogs up mountains. Each one was ranked at the highest level of difficulty. We drove to one of the nearby parks that supposedly didn’t have bears in it.

Kirb’s favorite Japanese mascot: the tomato chef of the Furano Marche

There’s no reason all cabs can’t be this cute

Though the loop was short, our stroll through Asahigaoka Park was delightful, and as we walked, we reflected on the fact that our preconceptions on hiking in Japan had been completely misguided. It doesn’t really matter where you are in Europe or the US, if you drive to a place with beautiful nature there are going to be a variety of options for traversing and enjoying that nature based on how hard you want to work. In Japan, it seemed there were only two options: You could park your car in a lot and stroll around a serene, enclosed space for 30 minutes, or you could spend the entire day on an extremely challenging route up the side of a mountain. Hokkaido was the first place we’ve traveled where an abundance of nature didn’t guarantee the existence of trails. Hiking just meant something different here.

Dozens of carved statues line the pathway

There’s only 30 minutes of trail here, but they are a splendid 30 minutes

Some ghostly white leaves among the greens, yellows, and reds

As we continued driving south, the landscape became an endless sea of autumn foliage for hours on end. We soon realized that instead of one of our normal hiking trips, this one was more like an American road trip, with sporadic stops along the highway that warranted a quick peek and a stretch of the legs. Sandantaki was a particularly nice place to stop, as there was no clue from the road that such an awesome waterfall was roaring only 100 meters away. We pulled over for lunch in a seemingly dead little roadside town and still received delicious curry and ramen. It really didn’t matter where we went, the quality of food was good everywhere.

The kōyō really starts popping off as we head south

The sort of thing you casually drive by in Ashibetsu

Wandering around some abandoned bridges off the highway

Not sure if the character on this warning sign really illustrates the danger of the action they are trying to dissuade here

When we stopped at the info center for Shikotsu-Toya National Park at 4:30pm it was already getting dark, but we were hoping for another short trail after hours in the car. The man inside was excited to speak to us in English - the only person in all of Hokkaido who did - explaining our options on a large map that was completely covered with markers for recent bear sightings. We weren’t particularly interested in walking around this area in the dark, so we caught the sunset over Lake Shikotsu and enjoyed the bright red leaves in the nearby park with the last of the evening light.

There wasn’t too much distance left before reaching our lodging, but it proved to be a particularly challenging stretch of road. For some reason, lots and lots of deer with fluffy white butts decided to all graze along the side of the newly-darkened highway, threatening to jolt out in front of us at any moment. At one point we came to a complete stop because an eight point buck was standing directly in our way in the middle of the road and didn’t want to move. We were all quite relieved to finally arrive at Horohoro Sanso, the poshest lodging we booked on the trip.

An eight point buck decides whether or not it will impale our under-insured rental car as we drive by

Potatoes for sale in the lobby of the “poshest” accommodation on the trip

Horohoro Sanso is a ryokan - a traditional Japanese inn with an onsen spa, old-school rooms, and buffet restaurant. There was a gift shop in the lobby, and presented front and center was a cart full of raw potatoes. This was no big city spa. Our room was lined with tatami mats and had futons set up in the center of the floor, with rice paper wall dividers and a low-rise table. As we cracked open a bottle of local sake and began to unwind after the tense drive, we started to notice that the walls of our room were splattered with a dark liquid. We moved in for a closer look and found that there were dark flecks on nearly every wall, disconcertingly concentrated in the corner by our beds. It looked very much like someone had been gruesomely murdered in this room and only minor effort had been put into covering it up. The whole establishment was noticeably run-down and in need of some TLC, but as the most expensive lodging on our trip, there were just a few too many blood stains in this room for our comfort. Kevin offered to go and see if we could be moved into another room, but the woman told him there wasn’t anywhere else to put us and then just kept bowing deeply and apologizing over and over until he walked away.

Some hard-earned, delicious local sake after a stressful drive. Notice the specks dotting the back wall

The bloodshed is particularly gruesome in the corner by our beds

Still, the place was quite charming if you didn’t look too closely at anything or think about the acts of depravity that had surely transpired in your sleeping chambers. We put on the crimson yukata jackets in our cupboard and headed down to the buffet for dinner, not expecting much, but were once again floored at how good the food was in such an inconspicuous location. This was probably the best buffet we’ve ever eaten. Many of Kirb’s absolute favorite foods were there: Tuna sashimi, steak, pizza, fried chicken, plus a whole tempura station with crispy fried eggplant, squash, and clumps of hen-of-the-woods mushrooms. They even had little creme brûlée cups for dessert! There were of course plenty of traditional Japanese foods on offer too, as well as vegetables, which Mazz loaded up on instead of fried things and pizza like her child of a husband.

A surprisingly excellent and expansive buffet in seemingly the middle of nowhere

Kirb never expected to get fried chicken, tuna sashimi, tempura, steak, and pizza on the same plate, but he was thrilled at the opportunity

Despite the yukata jackets, we don’t exactly blend in at Horohoro Sanso. We were most definitely the only gaijin here

The onsen here was gender separated, as is the norm, so we booked a private bath for the two of us so we could enjoy a soak together. Finding the private baths wasn’t exactly intuitive, and we had to have the guy at the front desk personally lead us to the dark, breezy corridor that led away from the main building. Just like the rest of the inn, the private bath chambers needed some TLC, but the water was hot and refreshing. Mazz decided to go and visit the women’s public baths the next morning and found that they were infinitely nicer than the one we had paid extra to use, so long as you didn’t mind being naked in front of a bunch of strangers.

Though spooky and cold, the exposed hallway felt particularly refreshing *after* the hot bath

Some serious mineral crystallization on the faucet in our private bath

We continued south to Jigokudani, or “Hell Valley,” as Mazz and Kevin were both interested in seeing a stink pit. Kirb, as it has been stated several times on this blog, is not a big fan of stink pits, but there was also plenty of nature to explore in this area, so he was just happy to move around outside.

So long Horohoro Sanso, you weird, dingy, charming little inn

Kevin mentioned before the trip that he was thinking of buying some bear mace, but we poo-pooed the idea. Once we got to Hokkaido, we realized it was probably pretty smart to have on hand if you planned on hiking anywhere on the island

Though the area directly in front of the sulphuric hot streams was crowded with tourists, once again there was nearly no one interested in walking along the trails through the woods, and we happily spent the morning exploring the steaming lakes and viewing the autumn colors. We decided to leave that town and have lunch somewhere less touristy, but when we parked in Toya about an hour later, all the restaurants downtown were already closed or had enormous waits. So, we walked a bit and sat down in the first open establishment we could find and ordered three barbecue pork and rice bowls. They were, to no one’s surprise, completely delicious. Mazz has seen the picture of the lunch several times since returning home and has remarked aloud each time, “I want to eat that again.” Our hotel outside of town looked out over Lake Toya with incredible views; we just had to bring our own food and drink along with us as there wasn’t anything available up on top of the hill.

Strolling through the fall colors in Jigokudani

Once again, there’s hardly anyone else on the trails

A great logo for the park that was only available on sold-out flags. Kirb would have bought this t-shirt in a second

it was pretty baffling how many people on this walkway took pictures and selfies with absolutely none of the gorgeous surroundings in the frame

Craggy spires overlooking the stink pits

A BBQ pork bowl that still haunts our dreams

The view from our bathtub at Hotel Cocoa. The rooms were modern and comfortable and cost €60

During our drive the next morning, the kōyō became so gorgeous that we pulled off the road and into a small town just to try and capture it properly in a photo. This area was particularly vibrant, so we continued following the side road all the way to Lake Sapporo. There were multiple pull-offs here for photos and we stopped at every single one of them. The pictures look nice, sure, but we noticed here as we had in several other spots in Hokkaido that our phone photos simply didn’t do justice to the grandness of the nature.

Time for another breakfast at the convenience store. What sounds good today? Bean Curd Refuse?

Mount Yōtei in the distance on our morning drive

A lovely place to end up after a spontaneous detour

Our flight was in the evening, so we decided to spend that final afternoon on the island checking out Sapporo, the biggest city in Hokkaido. We googled “gluten free ramen” and found a shop called Fukunoki that specifically offered it, though it was otherwise hardly traditional, as it specialized in tomato-based broths with shrimp. The woman who ran that place was truly doing her own thing, and it was delicious. Mazz thinks her bowl of curry ramen was arguably the best thing she ordered on the trip.

Take a high-rise and make it just a little more adorable

After lunch, we meandered through the sprawling Tanuki Koji open air shopping district, home to several enormous gachapon parlors. These multi-level businesses are filled with capsule machines selling some adorable and truly bizarre trinkets for a few hundred yen each. Many contained manga figurines on keychains, but others defied easy explanation. One machine doled out handwritten notes from a mother that said they love you and were proud of you. Nearby, another machine sold pouches covered in kanji, and even using google lens to learn that they were “lucky mayonnaise bags” didn’t bring any more explanation to their existence.

After examining every machine in the sprawling gachapon parlor, Mazz finally makes her decision

Here’s a handwritten note from a mom telling you she loves you, if that’s what you’re after

Or you could buy a Lucky Mayonnaise Okaki Big Air Mascot, like a normal person

The strangest thing we learned about Sapporo is that it is basically two cities, situated on top of one another. Beneath downtown Sapporo is another downtown Sapporo, sprawling in all directions with shops and restaurants. It snows a lot here in the winter, so they just built another city beneath the regular one where they can escape the ever-growing hills of snow and ice on the sidewalks. Walking through the underground city-sized mall was extremely cool and weird.

One of the “neighborhoods” built beneath the downtown business district

When in Sapporo, eat soft serve ice cream underground

This part of downtown Sapporo feels like it has looked exactly the same for decades

We wanted to have one final fancy seafood dinner in Sapporo, but the timing for our flight was such that it made more sense to return the car to the airport before we ate. Google said there was a good seafood restaurant inside of our terminal, so we planned on that; we’d had some great soba at the airport before the inbound flight. But when we arrived at New Chitose, we learned that not only was the restaurant we wanted closed, but every other restaurant inside had already stopped serving new customers for the evening as well, though it was only 6:30pm. Our flight wasn’t for several more hours; we’d arrived early to enjoy a leisurely seafood dinner before flying off. Instead, that final splurge meal in Hokkaido turned out to be a pile of onigiri, bags of pre-cooked chicken, katsu sandwiches, and sake jars from the Lawson shop inside the terminal. Every other restaurant may have been bizarrely shuttered, but there was still a convenience store inside the airport that sold all the usual items with no markup in price. With cheap sake and snacks, it was easy enough to kill the next few hours before our flight. When we arrived back in Tokyo, the final trains of the night were packed with bargoers, some passed out in the doorways, and we very much felt like we were back in the big city again.

Sometimes a nice seafood dinner turns into chicken in a bag

Our flight back to Berlin was surprisingly stressful, even though we got to the airport more than 2 hours early. In the enormous Narita check-in terminal, there was only one station that was completely clogged with people - ours - and the line to check in baggage stretched all the way out of the building. We stood in the line for over an hour and it moved maybe 30 feet, so Mazz went and found another, shorter line for us to stand in, but it wasn’t moving fast enough either. Eventually, someone from Austrian Airlines started rounding up all the people on our flight and putting them in a dedicated line, and there were a lot of us. We arrived at our gate just as the flight began to board, frustrated that we didn’t have any time to visit all the great shops we passed rushing through the terminal with yen jangling in our pockets. We also had plans to sit down for a nice final meal before this flight; once again we ate onigiri from Lawson instead.

For some reason, only our airline can’t handle their business, forcing hundreds of people to stand in line for hours and almost miss their flights

We grew to truly love these little seaweed triangles and missed them dearly when we got back to Berlin and couldn’t buy them at any corner store for €1

There were lots of ways we assumed things were going to go in Japan, and they usually didn’t. Often, what we got instead was more fun than what we had expected. It’s easy to feel overwhelmed in Japan: There is kanji seemingly everywhere you look, and if you don’t speak the language, it can sometimes feel like you’re swimming in confusion. But with a good friend as our guide and phones for translation, the language barrier never got in the way of our enjoyment. This is a trip that we will look back on with a special fondness, not because it was necessarily better than others, but because it was so different. Japan feels like another world entirely. It’s a lovely place to visit.