About Hokkaido Ways

"I was twelve when my father moved our family from Portland to Sapporo. He was a forestry researcher, and Hokkaido University had the best program in the world for what he studied."

I spent my teenage years skiing Niseko's powder on weekends, cycling through Furano's lavender fields in July, and learning to make ramen from the owner of a shop in Susukino who still remembers my order.

After college in Oregon, I spent eight years writing travel guides. I covered forty countries, but I kept coming back to Hokkaido. Other writers would ask me to cover it for them — they found it intimidating. Too big. Too rural. Not enough English.

That is exactly why I started Hokkaido Ways.

The island is bigger than Ireland but has fewer foreign visitors per year than Kyoto gets in a week. That is not because there is nothing to see — it is because there is no one telling the story in English. The existing guides dedicate twenty pages to Hokkaido and two hundred to Tokyo. That is backwards.

In 2022, I convinced Kenji — a photographer friend who grew up in Biei — to join me. We spent a year driving every road on the island. All twenty-four thousand kilometers of it. We stayed in eighty different hotels, ate at three hundred restaurants, and took fifty thousand photographs.

The result is what you are reading now. Not a guidebook — those go out of date the day they are printed. A living, evolving resource written by people who are still here, still exploring, still finding new places.

Every destination guide on this site has been personally visited within the last twelve months. Every restaurant recommendation is a place we have eaten at more than once. Every itinerary is a route we have actually driven.

Hokkaido is not just a place we write about. It is where we live.