Abashiri

The coast at the mouth of the Abashiri River has been settled for a very long time. The Moyoro shell mound by the river marks a village of the Okhotsk culture, a sea-hunting people who lived along this shore from roughly the fifth to the tenth century and left bone harpoons, pottery and the remains of pit houses. Ainu communities followed, and the name Abashiri comes from the Ainu language; Japanese traders and fishing crews worked the coast under the Matsumae system, with the interior left largely untouched.

The modern town was made by a prison. In 1890 the Meiji government opened a branch prison here, at the far edge of a territory it was trying to settle and defend against Russian expansion, and the inmates were set to cut the Central Road inland towards Asahikawa. More than a thousand prisoners were sent to the village, and so many died on the stretch between Abashiri and Asahikawa that it became known as the Prisoner's Road. The prison stayed, and the settlement around it grew on fishing, forestry and the farming the convicts had helped open up.

A railway reached the coast in the early twentieth century, the port was improved, and Abashiri became the market and shipping town of the Okhotsk district; it was raised to city status in 1947. Salmon, scallops and crab sustained it, along with sugar beet and potatoes on the farms inland. The old timber prison buildings were moved to the foot of Mount Tento in 1983, a year before the working jail moved into a modern building, and opened as a museum, and from the same decade icebreaker cruises turned the winter ice from a nuisance into the city's best-known asset.

Abashiri's identity is northern rather than conventionally Japanese. It sits closer to Sakhalin than to Tokyo, and the museums on Mount Tento present it that way: the Hokkaido Museum of Northern Peoples sets Ainu clothing and tools beside Sami, Inuit, Nivkh and Siberian material, while the shell mound and its museum deal with the Okhotsk culture that preceded both. Ainu place names cover the surrounding map, and the region's Indigenous heritage is now treated as a living part of local identity rather than a curiosity.

The prison is the other half of the city's reputation. Abashiri Prison was for decades a byword in Japan for the end of the line, fixed in the national imagination by a long series of yakuza films made in the 1960s, and the museum that preserves the old buildings is frank about the forced labour that built the road inland. Residents are used to the association and treat it with a certain dryness.

Winter shapes the year. The arrival of the ice is announced and watched for, the February festival, held since 1966, carves snow and ice in the middle of town. Much of the social life happens in small izakaya near the station, where the talk is of the catch, the weather and the ice. Tokyo University of Agriculture's Okhotsk campus brings a few hundred students to a city that would otherwise be older still.

Fewer than 35,000 people live in Abashiri, down from more than 40,000 in the 2000s, and the number has been falling for decades as young people leave for Sapporo and Tokyo; the surrounding towns of the Okhotsk district are emptying faster. The working population is concentrated in fishing and fish processing, farming, the prison and local government, the university campus, and a tourist trade that is intense for a few winter weeks and thin for much of the rest of the year.

The port sets the rhythm. Boats work the Okhotsk for scallops, salmon, Atka mackerel and crab, and the processing plants and cold stores nearby handle the catch; when the ice closes the sea, the fleet stops and the icebreakers take over. Inland, large fields of sugar beet, potatoes, wheat and onions run towards the lakes, worked by machinery on a scale unusual in Japan.

Most people live in low houses and small blocks of flats in the grid near the station or along the roads towards the lakes, and almost every household has a car. Snow clearing is a daily job from December onwards, and school and work timetables bend around blizzards. The persistent issues are depopulation and ageing, thin bus and rail services — the lines through this corner of Hokkaido have been repeatedly cut back — and a winter economy that depends on ice that arrives less reliably than it once did.

Abashiri eats from the Sea of Okhotsk. Hotate, the scallops farmed and dredged along this coast, are the signature: grilled in the shell at the harbour, served raw over rice, or fried. Salmon appears as sashimi, as ikura, the salted roe eaten by the spoonful over rice, and as ruibe, frozen raw slices that melt in the mouth, a method inherited from Ainu practice. Kegani, the hairy crab of the northern seas, is a winter luxury, and hokke, Atka mackerel, is split and grilled as everyday food.

The usual way to eat all of this is a kaisendon, a bowl of rice heaped with raw seafood, or a set meal in one of the counters near the station or beside the port. Hokkaido's other staples are here too: miso ramen, jingisukan, or Genghis Khan, of mutton and vegetables grilled on a domed iron pan, and dairy in the form of soft-serve ice cream sold long into the cold. Pond smelt pulled from the frozen lake are fried as tempura in winter.

Inland produce fills out the rest of the table — potatoes, onions, sugar beet, wheat for noodles, and milk from the farms of the Okhotsk district. A small local brewery makes beers from regional ingredients, among them a blend of beer and milk, and Hokkaido's dairy sweets and seafood preserves fill the souvenir shelves at the port and the airport.