Shinobu Katase guiding snowshoers above Lake Mashu. Photo / Terry Ward
Head east on Japan’s northernmost island for snow fairies, snow canoeing and an unbeatable winter holiday, writes Terry Ward
Two things can be true at once.
You can plan a rewarding winter trip to the Japanese island of Hokkaido without skiing a single slope.
You can also find yourself toasty warm in a canoe paddling through a winter wonderland, and plucking an instrument without making a sound.
READ MORE: What it’s like to go skiing in Japan as part of Club Med Kiroro Grand
These are among my many revelations during a February visit to Japan’s second largest island, famed among the schussing set for the fluffy white stuff dubbed Japow and legendary ski resorts like Niseko.
Instead of landing in Sapporo as do most visitors looking to ski, I touch down after an interminable series of flights from Florida in Kushiro, on the opposite coast of Hokkaido.
From there, I’m whisked off by shuttle for the roughly two-hour drive north into Eastern Hokkaido’s pristine landscapes, home to three of the island’s six national parks and a world of soft, snowy adventures.
The jet lag has me as wired as a newborn baby despite the late hour. On arrival at Oyado Kinkiyu, my modest ryokan in the hot springs village of Kawayu Onsen, I opt for a hot bath before bed in the form of a dip in the hotel’s onsen. The village has a sulfuric perfume similar to Rotorua’s and is cut through by the geothermal Oto River, where locals take to bathing from the sandy banks and low-key onsen resorts cater to a mostly Japanese clientele.
My Japanese being non existent, I require the front desk clerk’s aid deciphering the onsen signs (ladies or mens, I mime awkwardly) but am soon enough submerged in waters from the natural surrounding springs and river that are said to be higher in acidity than lemons (this special characteristic makes them highly sought after by certain onsen fans). Poached and pink, I’m happy to see I still have all my skin when I emerge. I proceed to fall immediately into bed and the dreamless, jetlagged sleep of the dead.
The next day, I set off to the west for the snowy banks of Lake Kussharo. With about 56km of mostly forested coastline, the caldera lake within Akan-Mashu National Park is known for sulfurous hot spring bathing opportunities along its shoreline as well as what feels like a particularly intrepid paddling adventure for a water woman more at home in the bathtub-like temperatures of Florida’s ocean.
At Kussharo Eco Tour, I’m greeted by a rambunctious sibling duo with bracing blue eyes and cotton candy-coloured tongues. They are border-collie mix pups, Yuki and Aki. They belong to Satoshi Yoshida, who co-owns the ecotourism company I’ve signed up with for a soft adventure in a bespoke double-canoe he built to carry our party of six through the snowy surrounding landscapes.
I notice Yoshida is sporting a baby carrier on his chest, but when I take a gander I see it’s a fur baby tucked inside–a beautiful grey and white cat that nuzzles close to his chest at my advances. We pull out the translator app and he tells me the animal is injured and asks our group if we mind if his dogs join us in the boat for a paddle.
We are a motley crew as we glide through the ice-choked lake – Americans on tour, our Japanese adventurer hosts who arrived here from Hiroshima more than a decade ago in search of a lifestyle closer to nature, and two energetic mutts scanning the shoreline for whatever they can herd.
Our paddling is hardly co-ordinated, but Yoshida navigates us into the flow of a small river that, if we followed it as far as we could, would eventually wend its way to the Pacific Ocean. But there are swans to ooh and ahh over along the route and other quiet diversions, too, including a nook we paddle into where bright green moss flourishes near sulfur vents along the snowy river banks. Just before our takeout point, an island appears in the stream and Yoshida beaches our boat, props open a foldable table he pulls from the narrow canoe as if from a magician’s hat and pours chocolate milk from a thermos.
Hokkaido is famous for its excellent dairy products, and the beverage is silky smooth and goes down a treat with the silence of Hokkaido’s winter all around.
Roughly an hour’s drive to the southwest, our next stop is Lake Akan Ainu Kotan, a cultural village home to a handful of Japan’s indigenous Ainu people, who were recognised by the Japanese government only in 2019. Inside the community theatre, professional woodcarver Kengo Takiguchi, from Anytime, Ainutime! greets us for a traditional wood carving lesson as we attempt to carve a bamboo form to make our own mukkuri. The handiwork part goes surprisingly well and soon enough I have something that resembles the traditional Ainu mouth harp. But learning to play it, our group soon learns, is an art form that appears to involve a certain lip agility we don’t possess, combined with the simultaneous yanking of a string attached to the instrument. When Takiguchi coaxes vibrating, melodious sounds from the thin piece of wood that remind me of a higher-pitched didgeridoo, we all look on in awe.
There is much shopping in the Ainu cultural village of the carved wooden animal variety, and I manage to pick up a few wooden owls with big yellow eyes for my kids. But all the attempted music-making has made me hungry. So I head to a postage-stamp-sized restaurant, Cafe Poronno, which has been introducing visitors to the traditional Ainu fare here for 40 years, and settle in for a spread of deer and trout sashimi, venison soup and salty salmon paste with rice.
On my last day in Eastern Hokkaido, I strap into snowshoes for a hike along the rim of Lake Mashu led by local guide, nature photographer and cottage maple syrup producer Shinobu Katase. We scout for deer that stay perfectly camouflaged within tangles of birch trees and plod alongside rabbit tracks written like Braille in the snow as we forge a trail above the striking caldera lake. Lake Mashu’s waters, more than 200m deep, are purported to be among the clearest in the world and watercrafts as well as swimming are prohibited.
During a break from all the stomping along, Katase pours hot lemonade spiked with syrup he harvested from his maple grove and I strike up a conversation with a French photographer who tells me he’s come in search of snow fairies.
He’s scouring the motionless woods with binoculars and scanning the caldera flanks for the most adorable winged thing on earth, I learn it’s the shimaenaga bird. A long-tailed tit, it’s one of the tiniest birds in Japan, and weighs no more than eight paperclips. It doesn’t appear for us. But the photographer shows me a photo on his camera and I’m smitten. It looks like a snowball, if a snowball had wings.
Later, in the packed gift shop at a national park overlook, where everyone is buying freeze-dried strawberries, Yubari melon sweets and other beloved Hokkaido treats to tote home, I notice a gaggle of teenage girls crooning kawaii.
They’re gathered around a collection of shimaenaga plushies.
I buy the softest one of them all as the sweetest memory of the winter vacation where I never once missed my skis.
GETTING THERE
Fly from Auckland to Kushiro Airport with one stopover with Air NZ.
DETAILS
japan.travel/en
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