The Northern Table: Hokkaidō's Food

Three seas reach Hokkaidō: the Sea of Japan to the west, the Pacific to the south and east, and the Sea of Okhotsk to the north, which closes over with drift ice each winter. Hairy crab, kegani, is the crab the island calls its own: a small, bristled shell packed with sweet, dense meat and a rich kani miso eaten from the shell itself. Only males above eight centimetres across the shell may be landed, and the catch follows the coast, to Mombetsu and Abashiri on the Okhotsk in spring once the ice has gone, and to Funka Bay in the south-west in summer. King crab, taraba, is served for the scale of its legs; snow crab, zuwaigani, for their sweetness.

Rarest of all is hanasaki crab, its name written with the characters for a flower in bloom. Nemuro, on the island's eastern tip, lands it in a season the town sets from 11 July to 20 September and gives it a festival at the port each August. Its shell turns a deep red the moment it meets boiling water.

Sarufutsu, a fishing village on the northern Okhotsk coast, has landed the largest scallop catch of any town in Japan many times over, and it does so by farming the open sea: the seabed is divided into four zones, young scallops are released into one zone each year, and each zone is left four years before it is harvested. Grilled in the shell with a drop of soy, the flesh needs nothing else.

Sea urchin is the taste of a Hokkaidō summer. The fishery opens from roughly June to August on Rishiri and Rebun, the two islands off the far northern tip, and on the Shakotan peninsula west of Otaru. Kitamurasaki, pale and delicate, makes up most of the catch. Ezobafun is smaller, rarer and a deeper orange. A bowl of both, side by side over warm rice, is called kōhaku, red and white. The same water grows Rishiri kombu, carried south on the kitamaebune trading ships of the Edo period and still chosen by Kyoto's kaiseki kitchens for a clear, delicate dashi.

Salmon closes the sea's calendar.

From September into November, chum salmon push up the island's rivers to spawn, and their roe is the north's other great prize: cured briefly in salt or a light soy and set glistening over warm rice, each egg keeping its shape until the bite breaks it. The early roe has the tenderest skins, and a Hokkaidō cook will say plainly which weeks are better.

Otaru was built on herring. In the late nineteenth century the catch along this coast came close to ninety thousand tonnes a year, and the money raised the stone warehouses along the canal. The herring left long ago. The counters stayed: Otaru keeps more than a hundred sushi restaurants, a whole street of them on Sushiya-dori, cutting nigiri from the morning's sea, sweet shrimp, squid, flounder and, in summer, the urchin of Shakotan. Sapporo's serious counters run on the same catch at eight or ten seats, where hairy crab arrives dressed in its own shell, the miso spooned back over the meat.

Hakodate's morning market began in the hungry years after the war, when farmers sold vegetables on the street outside the station. It is now some 250 shops between Hakodate Station and the bay, and its trade is squid: surume-ika from the strait, eaten so fresh it is still translucent, cut into fine ribbons with ginger, beside bowls of rice heaped with crab, urchin and roe.

Dairy came to Hokkaidō by government design. Milk was barely drunk in Japan before the Meiji era; in the 1870s the island's colonial office, the Kaitakushi, brought in American advisers and Western cattle. Edwin Dun set up a stock farm at Makomanai, south of Sapporo, in 1876, and a year earlier the government farm at Nanae near Hakodate had made Japan's first Western-style cheese. Hokkaidō now produces some 56 percent of Japan's raw milk, much of it on the broad pasture of the Tokachi plain.

The butter has a rounded depth that changes a boiled potato without help from salt, and soft-serve is sold from farm stands across the island all summer, tasting of that morning's milk. Furano opened its own winery in 1972, nine years after the town of Ikeda on the Tokachi plain opened Hokkaidō's first, and a cheese factory on the edge of town makes cheese to match. A cold glass of Furano white beside a scallop grilled in its shell is the north in two mouthfuls.

Cold climates build appetite, and Hokkaidō answers with bowls. Three cities claim a ramen by name. Sapporo's miso ramen took shape in 1955, a rich pork-bone broth with thick, curled noodles, later finished with butter and sweetcorn. Hakodate keeps to shio, a clear salt broth, in a port whose newspaper advertised Nanking noodles as early as 1884. Asahikawa sets pork and seafood stock under shoyu with a film of lard to hold the heat, sensible in the city that keeps Japan's official record low: minus 41 degrees Celsius, on 25 January 1902.

Soup curry began in a Sapporo café in 1971 as a medicinal broth of more than thirty spices. Chicken and vegetables followed, and by around 2000 the city had more than two hundred places serving it: thin and heavily spiced, the vegetables roasted whole, the rice kept apart and dipped in a spoonful at a time.

Jingisukan, named for Genghis Khan, is lamb or mutton grilled at the table on a domed iron plate. The sheep came for wool: in 1918 the government founded national sheep farms, Tsukisamu in Sapporo and Takikawa among them, and the island learned to eat what it sheared. Sapporo eats it with the city's own beer, brewed since the Kaitakushi opened its brewery in 1876.

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Summer is the generous season: the urchin fishery open, hanasaki crab landing at Nemuro, and sweetcorn, tōkibi in the Hokkaidō word, grilled with soy and butter at the roadside. In the greenhouses of Yūbari, an old coal town east of Sapporo, the Yūbari King melon ripens, a cantaloupe bred from Earl's Favourite and Spicy. The first pair of the year goes to auction at Sapporo's central wholesale market each May and has fetched millions of yen. The rest of the island's summer, the lavender and the lakes, belongs to Summer in Hokkaidō (opens in a new tab).

Autumn is the deeper table. The salmon run, and at Mukawa on the Pacific coast the shishamo come in from October, a small smelt found only on this shore and fresh enough in season to eat raw. New potatoes come out of the Tokachi fields, and the new rice, Yumepirika and Nanatsuboshi, arrives with the first ikura spooned over it.

The Summer Tour of Hokkaido runs two departures in 2027, from 25 June to 6 July and from 11 to 22 July. It opens with a welcome kaiseki in the forest at Biei, takes lunch at a hillside winery among the Furano vines and a sake tasting at Otokoyama in Asahikawa, and sets kaiseki at every ryokan on the route. On the Shakotan coast, lunch is at a counter run by the family that lands the catch, the morning's urchin on warm rice, and the road back passes the Nikka distillery at Yoichi, which Masataka Taketsuru built in 1934. In Sapporo, jingisukan comes with cold Sapporo beer in a red-brick hall of the old brewery, and the journey closes at a tempura counter awarded two Michelin stars the last time the guide covered Hokkaido, in 2017.

The Wild North Tour of Hokkaido, from 27 July to 6 August 2027, keeps to the far side of the island. It opens in Daisetsuzan, where the high trails (opens in a new tab) run above the tree line, and crosses to Shiretoko, where Rausu kombu goes into a clear dashi on its own shore. Kushiro, the harbour town most associated with robatayaki, gives an evening at a harbourside counter, the catch grilled over charcoal and handed across on a long wooden paddle, and the last dinner is a farewell kaiseki on Lake Shikotsu.

Late on a northern summer evening the light holds over the water, the charcoal burns down to a glow, and the last of the crab is cracked open at a table that has eaten from the same cold sea all day.

SummerThe Summer Tour of Hokkaido12 days25 June to 6 July 2027, or 11 to 22 July 2027$18,500per person, twin shareSee the journey