The Northernmost Point

Several months ago myself and James journeyed to the northernmost part in Japan. It all started one evening when we we're sitting around bored and the Hokkaido winter was beginning to take hold. I was looking at random places on Google maps when I thought I'd see where the northernmost tip of Japan was. I vaguely remember my reasoning behind this being that even in a place as stunningly beautiful as Toya, the sub Arctic winter was beginning to make things look a little grim and that things could only get more intense further up north. Sure enough when I found it there was a small town by the name of Soyamisaki dotted on the map. I went into "street view" and honestly it looked bleaker than starring down the barrel of a gun. Me and James spent a good five minutes laughing about how despicably horrible the place looked and wondering why anyone would dare to try and scratch out an existence in such a God forsaken part of the world. There was a long pause before James looked at me and said "Do you actually want to go and see it?". And sure enough I couldn't turn down an idea as mind blowingly stupid as that one.

Just another lovely day in Wakkanai

Soon enough we found ourselves booking train tickets and hotels. The general reaction of any locals we told was to laugh and go "Samui!!" which directly translates as cold but what I think they really meant was "You fucking idiots why would you want to do that!?". Nevertheless though we managed to shrug these warnings off and were soon on a train. Although the Snow had only just started falling in Toya the further north we went the deeper and deeper it got. As well as this things started to look less and less like Japan and more and more like 1950's Siberia. As the train ripped through air that was so sharp with the cold it could have probably cut skin, I shuddered to think of what the temperature was outside. Endlessly white, flat plains surrounded us that were occasionally broken by stiff pines or mountains that look like pieces of the earth that had tried to break away, but had become frozen solid before they could separate. It was certainly a far cry from the gently sloping green hills I was used to at home.

For all it's flaws Northern Hokkaido is still amazingly beautiful

After a total of eight hours on trains me and James arrived at Wakkanai, the northernmost city where we would spent the night before pressing onto Soyamisaki in the morning.  As I stepped out of the well heated train station into the dark night I was hit with a disorientation like none I had ever known. The first thing that hit me was the cold. To say it was cold is an understatement. Coldness implies discomfort, this went beyond discomfort. Basically my body was screaming at me to get out of the cold immediately or it would start shutting down. There weren't too many street lights lining the streets and all the signs were in either Japanese or Russian. English speakers have little or no presence in this part of the world but with the region being remarkably close to both Russia and disputed territories between Japan and Russia there must be a significant Russian community. This was quite a strange feeling for me as now I was in a weird spliced community of two cultures one of which I knew little about, the other I knew absolutely nothing about, at night, lost and cold, hundreds of miles away from my house and thousands away from my home. I don't think I had ever felt so alone in my entire life. Fortunately James appeared at my side hastily pulling a printed off map from his pocket and explaining to me through clattering teeth where the hotel was.

A sign detailing all the lovely places that are not Soyamisaki

I soon found myself in the merciful warmth of the hotel in which we were spending the night and quickly drifted off to sleep. In the morning we grabbed a light breakfast and decided to brave the conditions outside. Hastily finding a bus to Soyamisaki we clambered on board and sat at the back basically straddling the radiators. As the bus chugged on out of town it was battered mercilessly by howling winds and icy temperatures. I found myself wondering how any living thing could survive here and tried to imagine the prehistoric Ainu people who were the first to settle here. We stopped outside an elementary school that looked more like a bunker to let on some school children. As it turned out the door had been frozen shut so the driver had to get out via another door in the bus so he could pour anti freeze on the door and let the young children on board. I found myself laughing at the how tragic the whole affair seemed to me. Soon we reached the small town of Soyamisaki and disembarked. As we stepped out into cold midday sun we were greeted by a triangular monument with the words "The Northernmost Point in Japan" carved into it. Without hesitation we ran up a proceeded to get some cheesy tourist photos with the monument. James standing just behind it attempted to make some calls professing with disproportionate pleasure to anyone he could get through to "I AM THE NORTHERNMOST MAN IN JAPAN!" partly because of excitement and partly because of the deafening wind. 

Yay cheesy photos!

We spent the remaining two hours walking around looking for a cafe. However in this process we discovered a huge monument to an air crash disaster and a gift shop in which James bought some typical gift shop crap.In an effort to buy us some shelter until the bus came I bought some noodles in a seafood shack that looked like it hadn't seen business since the reign of the Tsar. We spent the remaining fifteen minutes in a bus shelter in which several visitors books had been left. Flicking through them we found a handful of English notes from several years ago. One that stood out to me was "The bus driver is a motherfucker!" and as I felt my limbs going numb and noticing that the bus was late I began to feel a certain sense of empathy with this random stranger. Very soon, however the bus arrived and we were back in Wakkanai before we knew it.

 The Air Crash Disaster Memorial and the supposed motherfucker bus driver

Although I give pretty much all of North Hokkaido a lot of abuse in this post I do want to say the place has a certain beauty to it. However the people there are clearly made of sterner stuff than I am because after a weekend of it I felt like bits of me were about to start dropping off so I was most certainly thankful to be going. All in all we got exactly what we expected from the trip and that was a really fucking weird weekend.