Hokkaido

I love Hokkaido, and have often gone bicycle touring there. A friend and I once decided to ride from Otaru to Hakodate, two of th...

Urban grind or mountain chalet? In truth, most of us want the best of both worlds. Yet while many Japan residents dream of findin...

For most people, March and April is spring. Spring in Japan means welcoming cherry blossoms and warm weather, and it is time to s...

Japanese concrete buildings constructed in the 1980s and apartment blocks built on ski resorts – two of the least likely sett...

About this time last year I did a trip to one of Hokkaido’s great peaks – Mt. Ashibetsu. This hike has one of my favorite huts—be...

“A foreign girl climbing Poroshiri alone? I have lived here 50 years, and the mountain is no joke.” So said the old man at the vi...

There I was in furious winds, hard-driving horizontal rain, looking up at the next section of the hike and wondering what the hel...

When I first moved to Sapporo, I started hiking in the hills around the city. During one such hike, I passed a large hut that loo...