Preface
It is often said that Japan is small and crowded. For the sake of
argument I like to disagree with this statement. It is true that it has
half the population of the States crammed into only one state (about the
size of California). It is also true that about 80% of the land is
uninhabitable because the mountains are too steep and the forests too
thick. Combine this with the fact that there are no movie theaters in
towns under a few hundred thousand people and the fact that everything in
Japan centers around Tokyo. What you get is some pretty crowded cities.
However, there are still some pretty large houses and some wide-open
fields. Hokkaido, the northern island of Japan, is famous for these wide
open spaces. It did not officially become a part of Japan until the end
of the 19th century and even then it was only to ward off the Russians.
Much of the development has taken place after the war, which makes
Hokkaido seem like the new frontier of Japan.
Having heard all of this from friends and books, I was interested to
see the place for myself. Coming from a small town in Illinois, Tokyo is
a bit of a shock. I thought perhaps the Japan for me lies to the north.
It is cooler with plenty of snow in the winter. Flat places, but also
plenty of mountains. Nice people, slower pace, etc.
Getting There
Taking the bullet train to Hokkaido can cost at over US$200 each way
though. I had a dream to bicycle my way to Hokkaido with my friend, Matt
from the States. However, since we were limited to only about eight or
nine days, we didn't want to waste all of our time getting there. We
decided to take the cheap train. Being that it is summer vacation here
now, there is a special ticket called the Seishun 18 Kippu that everyone
in Japan should use. It is the greatest thing. A person can ride JR
trains all day long on one ticket for only US$20. If you can read a
train schedule and plan ahead a little, you can go a long ways on that
twenty bucks.
Matt and I packed our stuff into small backpacks and put our mountain
bikes into special bike bags. We left Tokyo's Ueno station at about 9am
on July 22 (yes, the day after Mt. Fuji). We had to change trains about
eight times throughout the day as we made our way north along the Main
Northern Line. We crossed over to the Japan Sea side of the main island
and arrived in Akita City around 11pm. We took one final train out into
the country and spent the night in the train station after the last train
left.
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