One autumn in hokkaido

I firstsaw it in Akira Kurusawa’s "Dreams"–the tranquil strands of life in countryside Japan, the crying need for humankind to harmonize with nature, and the devastation wrought by man’s punctilious abuse of the environment.

But how does one cultivate a sense of appreciation for and oneness with nature when most people now live in the urban jungle? As Asia’s boomtowns expand their borders, more and more people are holed up in high-rise condominiums engulfed in a life defined by steel and concrete.

A recent trip to Hokkaido, Japan’s northernmost region, is a breather and an eye-opener for this city dweller jaded by Manila’s legendary traffic jams and the spinning swirl of a metropolis in mayhem.

The five-day sojourn with nine other Asian journalists in the Japanese countryside against the backdrop of autumn in full swing is my initiation to the simple truth that nature trips are not only meant to discover natural wonders but a powerful way for people from different cultures to experience a shared vision of the world.

We start our journey aboard the famous Shinkansen Express, Japan’s fabled bullet train. From Tokyo, it’s two hours to Sendai City in Miyagaki Prefecture. At more than 200 kph, the train barrels on at high-speed and before we know it, we are exploring the remains of a castle in a 20,000-sq.m. park at the foot of Mt. Aoba. The extant castle was built 400 years ago by Sendai’s first feudal lord, Date Masamune.

Sendai City is the economic and political center of the Tohoku district, and no different from Tokyo in its state of urbanization, but it is a historic town replete with memories of the old country. On our way back to city we pass by Tohoku University, alma mater of Koichi Tanaka, the 2002 Nobel Prize winner in Chemistry.

From Sendai, we travel by bus to the famous Matsushima Bay–said to be one of three most scenic views in Japan–for a seafood lunch on the pier before taking a boat cruise around the bay dotted with 261 tiny islands. The hour-long boat ride is a relaxing experience at sea after a half day on the train and the bus.

On our first night in Hokkaido, our guide, Masahiko Susuki, manager of the sales department of Hitachi Travel Bureau, takes us to a downtown restaurant for a rather exotic ox tongue dinner.

Ox tongue? Faster than we could say moo, the sliced tongues came in platefuls served with Sapporo beer. Conversation flows easily like the meal and as the night deepens, we agree that it is an interesting twist to sushi and sashimi.

The next day we proceed to Hachinohe, the second largest city in Aomori Prefecture. The trip from the bus station to our final destination– Oriase Valley–takes the whole morning, passing by hundreds of kilometers of rice paddies and farmlands planted to apple, long potato and various vegetables. The season before snowfall is said to be the best time of the year to pass through these areas as the leaves are turning red and gold, providing a natural festive touch to the countryside. But our guide says that timing is also important, as the colors are short-lived, with the leaves starting to fall in a few days to get ready for the winter.

We reach Towada-Hachimantai National Park a little before noon and embark on a three-hour walk through the 14-kilometer hiking trail of the famous Oriase stream. If there is an experience that brings one closer to the mysterious forces of nature, this must be it–a walk through the river under a forest canopy exploding in a riot of colors.

The golden leaves of beech trees are not only lovely to look at but are an engulfing presence. The forest walk takes us to different streams, waterfalls, rocks and winding pathways. In winter, Lake Towada is rimmed with ice and the whole scenery turns a pristine white.

We leave the yellow forest at dusk and begin another journey to another city. After a couple of hours on a bus, we board another train that will take us to Hakodate City, an international trading port at the southern end of Hokkaido.

The train passed through the 84.4- km. undersea Seikan tunnel, built in 1998. From there, it was almost a three-hour train ride to Hakodate. We arrive in the city at 9 p.m., in time for a press briefing with tourism officials.

Hakodate has festivals throughout the four seasons, which draws tourists at all times of the year. Most popular are the Hakodate Port Festival, the Winter Festival and the Festival of Flowers and Greenery. Hakodate is more Westernized with buildings and other architectural landmarks bequeathed by its old ties with Westerners when it was first opened as an international trading port in the late 18th century. There are Christian churches and Buddhist temples and embassy buildings.

In 2002, the city was visited by more than 65,000 foreign tourists. Including local tourists, the number of visitors comes up to more than five million.

What we are here for is the legendary view of the city from atop Hakodate Mountain. But with the clock inching close to midnight and the temperature dropping to five degrees Celsius, exhaustion forces me to beg off from the mountain trek. But the pictures say it all: a city spread out like tinsel town in the dead of the night, a magnificent vista of a thousand twinkling stars–except that you are viewing it from the top instead of gazing up at it in the sky.

The following morning, we start at the seafood market and a visit to Fort Goryokaku, the first Western-style fortress in Japan. This star-shaped fort is the symbol of Hakodate and is now a national historic site, the Goryokaku Park. In summer, the park becomes a stage for open-air plays. With its over 1,500 cherry trees, it is also the premier spot in Hakodate for the cherry festival, one of Japan’s oldest traditions.

On the long trip to Otaru from Goryokaku, we pass by more mountains in intermingling reds, yellows, oranges and greens. We stop for a hearty lunch and a dip in what they claim is "the biggest hot spring in the universe" to rejuvenate both body and soul.

We line up at the entrance in what, to many of us, is our first experience of a public bath. Special arrangements have been made for us to take pictures of the facilities, "but please, please, no pictures of humans," our tour guide insists.

Japan is interestingly a land of volcanoes and the lunch time dip in the hot spring is followed by a whole day bus ride and a brief stop to view the Usuzan and Showa-shinzan active volcanoes, and a visit to a bear farm. We arrive in Otaru at in time for dinner at the famous Otaru canal.

Built in the early 1920s, the canal is as famous for its old ware houses converted into restaurants and haberdashers as it is for the very romantic night view. It is the most visited place in Otaru, and we soon see why: Otaru canal by night, with promenades and gas lamps, is simply beautiful.

After a short evening walk around the canal, we feast on a generous buffet of meats, vegetables, fish and rice in one of these old warehouse-restaurants; dinner is spiced up by rounds of beer and conversation that hops from Tokyo’s real estate prices to married and single life’s blues to the then forthcoming elections in Japan.

Traveling, once wrote Paul Theroux in The Washington Post, is only glamorous in retrospect. When I look back on it now, it is indeed one of the most unglamorous trips I’ve ever had. We are on buses, trains and taxis in more ways than I could imagine.

As we board another bus the following morning to proceed to Sapporo, I remember Jack Kerouac’s famous novel On the Road, inspired by his road trip from the United States East Coast to San Francisco and down to Mexico in the early 1950s. It is our fifth day on the road and another hundred-mile journey on a bus is in the offing.

"What is interesting about spending half the time sleeping, dreaming and sightseeing on a bus most of the day and stopping at touristy sites only to take photographs?" we wonder aloud at the breakfast table at the Authent Hotel that morning.

It would have been better to stay in a place a little longer to experience the views, its people, its cultural showcases and to shop and mingle with the crowd. But perhaps Kerouac was right when he said: "Our battered suitcases were piled on the sidewalk again; we had longer ways to go. But no matter, the road is life."

Otaru was a fishing ground for herring in the olden times. Down the ages, spring had always been associated with herring fishing, especially during the Meiji and Taisho eras. Around this time, many amimoto (fishermen’s bosses) built houses that served as both residences and workshops. We visit a replica of one of these famous houses–the Nishin Goten–perched on a hill in Shukutsu, where fishermen’s tools and costumes of fishery employees are on display.

Lunch finds us in Sapporo City, the biggest city in Hokkaido and the third largest city in Japan in terms of land area. This industrial town is the home of the Sapporo Beer Museum, the most popular tourist destination in the area. At the Sapporo Bier Garten (beer garden), which used to be the Sapporo Beer Factory, one of the biggest beer companies in Japan, we sit down to enjoy the "Genghis Khan meal", which consists of lamb, vegetable and seafood.

There are more sites, more stopovers but the trip isn’t just a matter of sightseeing and gustatory explorations. It is also a close encounter with the Japanese people and way of life. What they say about Japan is true: it is a country that works with clockwork precision. Our trip, hectic as it is, never missed a minute on schedule, never missed a beat as we move from city to city and glide smoothly with the downhill drift of days.

Chieko Okado, our English interpreter, is so generous with her time and patience in explaining even the littlest bit of trivia. Without her I am lost in the din and flurry of local color that I couldn’t fully grasp because of the language barrier.

At night, I watch CNN in Japanese or Korean telenovelas (very popular in Japan) with Japanese subtitles. It has become a ritual game for my Thai roommate and me to guess the plot of the story and speculate on what happened with the world the day before, only to find out later that there is a bilingual key on the remote control, although it is indicated with a Japanese character.

A luggage full of tourist brochures, a million megabites of digital photos, used train, bus and airline tickets and hazy notes of insights and interviews scrawled on a battered notebook are now what remains of the trip.

But going places leaves a lasting imprint in the mind. When an experience allows you to venture beyond your own familiar territory and comfort zone, albeit momentarily, you know that it is etched somewhere permanently in the soul. All the more when you have to distill your thoughts into a story, a memoir for other people to take part in. Ah, the voyeuristic nature of travel writing.

But can one really share the experience of seeing snow for the first time on a mountain in Otaru? The whitened roadside and the towering mountains capped in ice?

I’ll be honest. I am insatiably curious about people’s lives, about places, about other world views. But what was I up to in Hokkaido? Though I am curious about the sight of falling autumn leaves and the murmur of the night breeze in a strange country–throw in keen interest on Japanese sake and beer for my liquor-loving soul–I’m more curious about how each one of us viewed the whole experience as filtered through our own cultural backgrounds that are as varied as the colors of the rainbow.

I guess I will never know in full, but coming to Japan and coming into each other’s lives is an experience in itself.

"Certainly," wrote American writer Miriam Beard, "travel is more than the seeing of sights; it is a change that goes on, deep and permanent, in the ideas of living."