Hokkaido

Hokkaido is both a region and a prefecture: it is the only one of Japan's eight traditional regions that consists of a single administrative unit. It covers about a fifth of the country's land but holds only a small share of its people, so the landscape is dominated by forest, mountains and large-scale farmland rather than the continuous towns of Honshu.

What sets the region apart is its late incorporation into Japan and its northern nature. Until the nineteenth century it was Ainu Mosir, the land of the Ainu; organised Japanese settlement began only in 1869. Its fauna – brown bears, red-crowned cranes, Blakiston's fish owls, Steller's sea eagles – belongs to the northern side of the Blakiston Line, the zoogeographical boundary along the Tsugaru Strait. Visitors come for powder snow in winter, flower fields and cool air in summer, and seven national parks.

Hokkaido lies between the Sea of Japan, the Sea of Okhotsk and the Pacific, separated from Honshu by the Tsugaru Strait and from Sakhalin by the Sōya Strait; Cape Sōya near Wakkanai is the northernmost point of Japan's administered territory. The island is roughly a diamond, with the Oshima Peninsula extending south-west towards Honshu and the Shiretoko and Nemuro peninsulas reaching east towards the Kuril Islands.

A volcanic arc runs through it: Daisetsuzan and the Tokachi range in the centre, the Akan and Shiretoko volcanoes in the east, and Shikotsu, Tōya and Yōtei in the south-west, each associated with caldera lakes. The Hidaka Mountains, formed by collision rather than volcanism, form the southern spine. Large plains – Ishikari, Tokachi, Kushiro, Nayoro – and the wetlands of Kushiro and Sarobetsu occupy the lowlands.

The region has Japan's coldest climate: humid continental with long, snowy winters and short, mild summers, largely without the June–July rainy season. The Sea of Japan coast receives heavy snow from the winter monsoon, while the east is drier and colder, with drift ice on the Okhotsk coast from late January to March and summer sea fog along the Pacific near Kushiro and Nemuro. Inland basins such as Asahikawa and Furano have the widest temperature range in Japan.

Jōmon hunter-gatherers lived here for millennia, followed by the Zoku-Jōmon, Satsumon and Okhotsk cultures and, from around the thirteenth century, the Ainu. Japanese traders established themselves in the south from the fifteenth century, and from 1604 the Matsumae clan controlled trade with the Ainu under the Tokugawa shogunate.

In 1869, after the Boshin War ended at Hakodate, the Meiji government renamed Ezochi as Hokkaidō and began systematic colonisation through the Development Commission, bringing farmer-soldiers, settlers from across Japan and foreign advisers. Coal, herring, timber and farming drove the economy in the first half of the twentieth century. After 1945 the region lost Sakhalin and the Kurils, received many repatriates and became an ordinary prefecture; the 1972 Sapporo Olympics and the 1988 Seikan Tunnel tied it more closely to the rest of Japan.

Two cultural layers define the region. The Ainu heritage survives in place names, crafts, dance and ritual, with centres at Upopoy in Shiraoi, Nibutani in Biratori and the Akan Ainu Kotan. The settler culture, less than two centuries old, is marked by grid-planned towns, a dialect close to standard Japanese, Western-style buildings from the Meiji era in Hakodate, Otaru and Sapporo, and a strong winter-sports and festival tradition around snow and ice.