Shiraoi, Hokkaido

Along the coast road that runs toward Tomakomai, the smell of the sea arrives before any sign does. This stretch of Hokkaido belongs to Shiraoi — a town where the land produces beef cattle, race horses, and cold-water seafood in roughly equal measure, and where the question of whose land it originally was has become the organizing principle of civic life.

The opening of Upopoy in 2020 placed the National Ainu Ethnic Museum at the center of that question. The complex sits beside Lake Poroto and includes a memorial facility alongside the museum and the National Ethnic Harmony Park — a configuration that signals something more deliberate than cultural tourism. At the market stalls and festivals nearby, chep ohaw, the Ainu salmon broth, shares space with Shiraoi beef and Kojohama tarako, the salted cod roe that has been processed along this coastline long enough to carry its own registered trademark. The port festival and the Chep Festival mark different rhythms of the same fishing and farming calendar.

Inland, the terrain rises quickly toward Tarumae and the Shikotsu-Toya National Park, and the Kuttara caldera lake sits in near-perfect stillness, its water among the clearest in the country. The horse farms — Shadai among them, operating since 1928 — occupy the flatter ground between mountain and sea. The brown, mineral-heavy water of Shiraoi Onsen, drawn from a moor spring along National Route 36, is the kind of bath that feels functional rather than theatrical: something a livestock worker or a fisherman might stop at on the way home.