Niikappu, Hokkaido

Thoroughbred foals stand close to their mothers in paddocks that run almost to the road's edge. This is Niikappu, a town on Hokkaido's Pacific coast where the horse industry shapes the daily geometry of the land — the long fence lines, the low stable roofs, the particular silence of early mornings on the Hidaka plain. The Hidaka mountain range rises to the north, its ridgeline anchoring the sky above Poroshiri, while the south opens flat toward the ocean.

What sits beside all this, unexpectedly, is a vast collection of vinyl records. The Niikappu Le·Cord-kan holds an archive that rivals any in the country, and the town has built a strand of its civic identity around this unlikely pairing of racehorses and music. Nearby, the Niikappu Onsen Le·Cord-no-Yu offers a sodium-chloride spring bath, the kind of facility that serves local farmers and stable hands as much as anyone passing through.

At the Yūshun Kinenkan, material connected to racehorses — including exhibits related to Oguri Cap — occupies a dedicated museum space, suggesting how seriously the town takes its equestrian history. The Niikappu Doro-kazan, a mud volcano designated as a natural monument by Hokkaido Prefecture, sits quietly in the landscape, occasionally releasing muddy water during seismic activity. The Komamaturi festival marks the horse culture in the calendar. These elements — mountain, pasture, spring, record groove, mud — coexist without explanation, the way most working towns simply accumulate what they are.