Not a skyscraper in sight

Tag : Thin Section Bearing

The writing on the satnav screen in the car we pick up at Chitoseairport is in Japanese. Luckily there is an idiot's guide leafletand, when we get going, "she" speaks English. I eventually come tothink of her as Tokyo Tessa.
The others in our group are in a Toyota Prius hybrid, which is easyon the petrol but has a satnav slapper called Sapporo Sue whospeaks only Japanese. This would be a problem if we didn't have acouple of Japanese speakers with us to sort out the inevitablemix-ups (inevitable bearing in mind my last car sported the latesttechnology of the time - a cassette player).
Chitose airport is in the south-west of Japan's northernmost islandof Hokkaido and, after a week in Tokyo, it's a bit of a revelation.There are 12 million people in the Tokyo prefecture, livingcheek-by-jowl with 6 million vending machines on 2187 squarekilometres of land. That's about 5847 people (and 2743 miraculouslyunvandalised vending machines) per square kilometre.
On Hokkaido there are 67 people per square kilometre. About thesize of Tasmania, it is one-fifth of Japan's land mass but has only5 per cent of the population. Here, after the skyscraper canyonsand neon-burst hustle and bustle of Tokyo, you can feel your mindexpand to fill the space.
Hokkaido is surrounded by the Sea of Japan to the west, the Sea ofOkhotsk to the north and the Pacific Ocean to the east and south.This, along with a couple of mountains and volcanoes, means hotsprings, a cool climate and a freezing winter with heavy snowfallsthat attract more Australian powder hounds to its ski slopes eachyear.
In contrast to teeming Tokyo, Hokkaido is like the bastardlove-child of the American midwest and Switzerland. There are wildand woolly national parks, wide-angled vistas, dairy farms and,especially around Australia's newest favourite winter destinationof Niseko, enough A-framed homes and shops to make an Austrianyearn for home. And for fly-drivers, there's more good news: inJapan they drive on the right side of the road. Which is the left.Right?
In the south-west, where we are going to make a circuit south fromChitose along Expressway 36 to Lake Toya, on to Niseko and then onagain to Sapporo, there is a network of motorways and smaller roadsthat make driving easy. Further west and north it's a vastlydifferent kettle of fish: two-thirds of Shiretoko National Park,for instance, has no roads at all.
We're heading off into the manicured section and our first stop isPoroto Kotan, a lakeside reconstruction of an Ainu village atShiraoi. Hokkaido was first settled by the Ainu people, who happilyminded their own business until the Edo period in about 1600, whenthe Matsumae clan moved across the water from the mainland andbegan the slow process of wiping out the Ainu and their culture. Itwas only in the late 1990s that discriminatory laws were repealedand the revival of the ancient Ainu culture was allowed.