Minamifurano, Hokkaido

Forest covers nearly all of Minamifurano — not as a backdrop but as the dominant fact of the land. The town sits in a high-altitude basin, ringed by the Tokachidake range to the northeast, the Hidaka mountains to the southeast, and the Yūbari range to the west. Kanamayama Lake spreads at the center, formed by the Kanayama Dam, the only hollow gravity concrete dam in Hokkaido. In July, the lakeshore hosts the Kanamayama Kosuimatsuri; in August, canoes move through the same water during the Minamifurano Canoe Tournament. The high school here fields both a canoe club and a curling club — the only school in Hokkaido to do so — which says something about how this community has shaped its identity around the cold and the water.

The agriculture runs alongside all of this. Potatoes, carrots, sweet corn, and kabocha are grown in the highland fields. Local products include butaじゃが and the snow-capped kabocha variety called yukigesho, along with kumasasa tea and Furano highland soba. The nampue Ezo katsu curry is another local preparation. Matsura Takeshirō surveyed this land in 1858; gold was panned here from the late nineteenth century; in 2009, Minamifurano passed what is considered Japan's first ordinance protecting a single fish species — the itou, a large salmonid native to cold northern rivers. The land has been read, worked, and legislated with some care.