The road out of Biei climbs in a long, easy line, and the land begins to fold into itself. Wheat, potato, beet and pasture run across the hills in separate panels, stitched together by windbreaks of larch and divided by farm tracks no wider than a single car. A tractor crosses one slope at a slow, even pace. Behind it, the Tokachi range keeps its blue outline against the sky, still carrying snow on its higher shoulders in the middle of July.
Biei and Furano lie some thirty-five kilometres apart in central Hokkaidō, forty minutes by road with Kamifurano and Nakafurano between them, and the two names are said together so often that they sound like one place. They are two. Biei is hill country, all patchwork and tree line, on a road that never runs straight for long. Furano is a basin, broader and softer at the edges, framed by the same mountains and cut through by the Sorachi River. Between them lies the loveliest summer farmland in Japan.
Neither town has a great monument. The sights are a bend in the road, a sudden band of colour, a barn roof, a line of poplars, and a view that slips behind the next rise almost as soon as it appears.
the patchwork
Biei's patchwork hills
Farmers began working these slopes around 1900, turning a free-draining upland into the rotation of wheat, potato, sugar beet, corn and pasture that still defines the town. Crops change field by field each year to keep the soil from tiring, and from any rise the result is a quilt of working ground. Biei calls it the patchwork. Each field's shape follows contour, drainage and the reach of the machinery that works it, and the beauty of the whole is a by-product of good farming.
Two named roads carry the district. The Panorama Road runs south of the town centre through broad views that open towards the Tokachi range, the peaks filling the horizon on a clear day. The Patchwork Road runs north-west through tighter, closer country, where fields meet in clean diagonals and a single tree can anchor an entire hillside.
Certain trees here have become landmarks in their own right, planted as windbreaks and boundary markers and then made famous by advertising. The Ken and Mary Tree, a tall poplar named after a car commercial of the early 1970s, stands alone on its ridge. Mild Seven Hill carries a line of larches planted to shelter the fields, later the backdrop to a cigarette advertisement. A trio of oaks nearby is known simply as the Parent and Child Tree. None of them is grand on its own account. What they give the land is scale: without a tree, a barn or a windbreak, Biei's hills would flatten into an even green with nothing to measure it against.
Among the crop rows sits one deliberate exception. Shikisai-no-Oka, on the hills south of the town, plants some thirty flower varieties in bands: poppy, lavender, marigold, salvia and lupin laid in stripes that shift through the season and run down the slope like lengths of ribbon. It is planted for colour alone. The fields around it are farms, and their verges and field edges stay off limits because each crop is a family's living.
the basin
Furano's basin and flower slopes
Furano lies at the southern end of its basin, along the Sorachi River, ringed by the same Tokachi range that stands behind Biei. Where Biei folds the land into hills, Furano opens it out: wider fields, longer sightlines, a town built where the farm country meets the mountains. The basin's carrots, onions and melons carry the Furano name into markets across Japan, and the Furano melon, netted and orange-fleshed, is picked from early July into August and sold from farm stands along the road, cut and chilled.
The flower slopes sit mostly north of the town, around Nakafurano and Kamifurano, where the farmland tips upward just enough to turn a field into a view. Lavender carries the district's reputation, but it shares the slopes with lupin, poppy and marigold in their turn, so the band of colour in any given week depends on which flower has reached its height. Seen from the road below, a slope of lupin is a soft climb of pink, cream and violet. From higher ground, the same rows resolve into pattern, each one following the fold of the land beneath it.
Furano Winery, founded by the city in 1972 on a hill above the town, makes wine from grapes that ripen in the cool of the basin, and its vine rows are the quiet counterpart to the flower slopes. The basin grows lavender for scent, melon for sugar and grapes for wine, all from the same northern light and volcanic soil.
shirogane
Shirogane: the Blue Pond and the forest
Above Biei the road climbs into birch and spruce towards the Tokachi range, and the farms give way to forest. A few minutes short of the small onsen settlement of Shirogane lies the Blue Pond, made by accident of an engineering work: a chain of embankments built across the river below Tokachidake, behind which the water pooled among the larches and stayed. Minerals dissolved in the water give it a blue that shifts with the light, milky turquoise under a high sun and nearer slate under cloud, and the drowned larch trunks stand up out of it, grey and branchless, in rows that look planted. On winter evenings the pond is lit after dark under snow.
Just upstream, at Shirogane, the Shirahige falls drop out of the cliff face into a river of the same impossible colour, seen from a bridge directly above. The settlement is a handful of hotels and a ryokan on the slopes of the mountain, its spring rising from the volcanic hills above, and it is the place to sleep in this country, ahead of either town.
The forest ryokan of Shirogane has seventeen rooms in low wooden wings joined by covered corridors, each with an open-air onsen of its own among the birch, and a kaiseki of central Hokkaidō at dinner, with the vegetables of the Biei farms on the table.
the road
Seeing Biei and Furano by road
Both towns are seen from the road, in short intervals: a curve, a rise, a field changing colour, then the next fold of land closing the view. The best of it lies between the named viewpoints: a harvested field beside one still green, a farmhouse half hidden by a rise, a shaft of afternoon light crossing a slope of wheat.
The light changes the land through the day. In the morning the ridgelines are sharp and the crop rows read as drawn lines. By early afternoon the sun flattens some slopes while deepening the colour in the flower fields, and by early evening the shadows lengthen and the mountains soften to watercolour. Sunflowers follow the lavender into the fields around Furano as July turns to August, and by then the lavender nearest the road has been cut back for its oil.
None of it needs a cloudless sky. Cloud softens the patchwork into tone; rain darkens the greens and quiets the palette without emptying it. Central Hokkaidō's summer air carries far less humidity than Honshū's, and that clarity lets a field of colour read all the way to the mountains behind it.
the season
The season, field by field
The flower fields of Biei and Furano bloom in a relay. Lupin and poppy colour the slopes from late June, the lavender follows through July, and sunflowers and the late annuals of Shikisai-no-Oka carry the colour into August. The crops keep their own calendar beneath it: the wheat turns gold and is cut in late July and August, and the potato fields flower white and pale violet in midsummer, a bloom almost nobody comes to see. By late September the first colour is on the upper slopes of the Tokachi range and the fields below are being turned for the winter.
Central Hokkaidō is a short flight from Tokyo to Asahikawa, about half an hour by car from Shirogane, or two hours by road from Sapporo across the farm country of the Ishikari plain. The towns are best travelled by car and driver, stopping wherever the light falls.
the journey
A Hokkaido summer tour through Biei and Furano
The Summer Tour of Hokkaido begins here, with two nights at the forest ryokan of Shirogane, in a room with its own open-air onsen and the woods close outside the glass. One day is given to the patchwork hills and the Blue Pond, another to the lavender of Furano in the older fields away from the farm shop. The tour departs twice in 2027, from 25 June to 6 July and from 11 to 22 July.
From the farm hills it drops south to Lake Shikotsu, the clearest lake in Japan, and goes on to fireworks over Lake Toya, the cold sea urchin of the Shakotan coast and the counters of Sapporo. It is limited to 8 guests, and its Tour Directors travel every mile of it beside them.
The Hokkaido summer tour, 2027, through the flower fields of Furano →
questions
Questions
Is Biei or Furano better to visit?
Both, because they are about forty minutes apart and different in kind. Biei is hill country, the patchwork fields, the named trees and the Blue Pond, best seen from the road; Furano is a basin of flower slopes, farm stands and a winery, best taken slowly.
When are the flower fields of Biei and Furano in bloom?
From late June into August, in a relay: lupin and poppy first, lavender through July, then sunflowers and the late annuals. Shikisai-no-Oka in Biei plants its bands of flowers to keep colour across the whole summer.
What is the Blue Pond in Biei?
A pond above Biei, near Shirogane Onsen, formed behind embankments built across the river below Tokachidake. Minerals in the water give it its blue, and the trunks of drowned larches stand up out of it.
How far are Biei and Furano from Sapporo?
About two hours by road. Asahikawa Airport, with flights from Tokyo, is closer, about half an hour by car from Shirogane and Biei.
Where to stay near Biei and Furano?
At Shirogane Onsen in the forest above Biei, where a forest ryokan of seventeen rooms gives each its own open-air onsen. The Summer Tour of Hokkaido spends its first two nights there.
Can visitors walk into the fields in Biei?
No. The fields are working farms and private land, and the famous trees stand in them; they are seen from the roads and the viewpoints, which is where the views are best.