Mukawa, Hokkaido

Smelt season pulls the town's attention toward the mouth of the Mukawa River, where Mukawa shishamo — a fish distinct from the imported variety sold elsewhere in Japan — has been caught and dried here for generations. Inland, the Yufutsu plains give way to the Hidaka foothills, and the town splits along that geography: the coastal former Mukawachō, and the forested former Hobetsuchō deeper in the mountains.

It is in Hobestu that the ground has yielded something unexpected. The Hobetsu Museum holds fossil remains of Kamuisaurus japonicus — a hadrosaurid dinosaur of considerable scale excavated from the local bedrock — and a new wing is scheduled to open in 2026, suggesting the town is still working out what it holds. The museum sits quietly in a small inland settlement, not a grand institution but a local one, where the weight of deep time sits alongside displays of regional natural history.

At the roadside complex Michinoeki Mukawa Shiki-no-Yakata, the practical and the restorative overlap: hot spring baths, a pool, a library, and places to eat are gathered under one roof. Nearby, Jukkai Onsen offers a tea-brown water drawn from cold mineral spring, heated and piped into an outdoor bath. Thoroughbred horses are raised at Uemizu Farm in the same countryside. Hobetsumerons ripen in summer fields. The town continues its routines — fishing, dairy farming, automobile testing on private tracks — largely indifferent to whether anyone is watching.