Bihoro, Hokkaido

The road climbs steadily toward Bihoro Pass, and then the land simply drops away — Kussharo Lake spread wide below, the horizon flattened by sky. The pass sits within the Akan Mashu National Park boundary, and the roadside station there, *Gurutto Panorama Bihoro Toge*, exists less as a tourist facility than as a place to register the scale of what surrounds the town below.

Bihoro itself occupies the floodplain between the Abashiri and Bihoro rivers, compact and unhurried, its fields given over to beet, potato, onion, wheat, and carrot in rotation. The agricultural logic is visible from any elevation. A shop called *Krishna* is credited as the origin of natural-pigment curry, and the *Ohotsuku* series of curry products — including one named for drift ice — carries that local identity outward. The *Bihoro Kanko Wagyu Matsuri* and the *Bihoro Toge Matsuri* are among the events that pull the town's threads together through the year, while the *100km Duathlon* brings a different kind of attention to the roads and terrain.

At *Bihoro Hakubutsukan*, decorated pebbles among the cultural artifacts speak to Ainu settlement here long before the Meiji-era agricultural opening. The name itself traces to an Ainu phrase meaning water-abundant. *Mokotozanzan* rises at nearly a thousand meters and offers hiking and ski terrain, while the forestry hall *Kiterasu* makes the FSC-certified woodland legible rather than merely scenic. The Self-Defense Forces base, the old naval park at *Bihoro Koku Koen*, the *Rinnai Chashi* fortress site with its broad view — these are the layers that accumulate quietly beneath the farming town's surface.