Otoineppu, Hokkaido

Snow accumulates here in depths that reshape the landscape entirely — this is Otoineppu, a small village on the Sōya Main Line between Asahikawa and Wakkanai, where the forests cover most of the land and the Teshio River runs quietly alongside the road. The village is sparsely populated, yet a notable share of those who live here are students and staff of Hokkaido Otoineppu Art and Craft High School, a boarding institution whose presence gives the place an unlikely creative density for somewhere so remote.

The soba made here is dark — ground from buckwheat that includes the hull — and the dough carries an almost earthy smell. At the roadside station, a Seicomart occupies space where a soba shop once operated, and the shelves still stock Otoineppu yokan and local honey alongside everyday goods. The craft tradition runs deeper than the souvenir shelf: Ecmuseum Osashima Center preserves the atelier of Sunazawa Bikki, the sculptor whose work and materials are displayed there, and the woodcraft coming out of the high school continues that lineage in a working rather than archival sense.

The Osashima district holds the site where Matsu'ura Takeshirō proposed the name Hokkaido, drawing on an Ainu word. That history sits quietly in the landscape, marked but not amplified. Teshiogawa Onsen, a village-run facility, offers an indoor bath and an outdoor one — functional, without ceremony. The mountain Kanpudake rises to the south, and the forests press in from all sides.