Furano

The basin was Ainu land, and the name is generally traced to an Ainu word for a smell or flame — a reference to the sulphurous streams running off the volcanoes of the Tokachi range to the east. Japanese settlement began in the 1890s, when the Meiji government's colonisation policy sent farmers north; they cleared forest, drained the valley floor and planted rice, beans and potatoes in a climate far colder than anything they had farmed before. The railway arrived soon after and made the town the market and shipping point for the whole basin.

Lavender came later and by accident. Grown for perfume oil from the 1950s, it suited the dry basin and spread across the district until the early 1970s, when cheaper imported and synthetic fragrance collapsed the price and most growers ploughed their fields under. A few fields were kept, and a photograph of one of them in the national railway's 1976 calendar brought the first visitors. The flowers were replanted for the view rather than the oil, and the industry that had died became the town's identity.

Television did the rest. Kita no Kuni kara, a drama series set on a farm outside Furano, ran on and off from the early 1980s for more than twenty years and made the town's woods and log cabins familiar across Japan. Meanwhile the ski slopes above Kitanomine were developed into a resort that has held World Cup alpine races, and the town set up its own winery and cheese factory to add value to local produce. Like most of rural Hokkaido, Furano has been losing population since, and the balance between farming and tourism runs through everything it does.

Furano's public identity rests on two things: flowers and the claim to be the navel of Hokkaido. The town sits close to the geographical centre of the island, and it turns that into an annual festival at which participants paint faces around their navels and dance through the streets — an event of real local affection rather than a tourist invention, and the fixed point of the summer calendar.

The rest of the year is agricultural. Seasons are talked about as work: the asparagus in spring, melons and sweetcorn in high summer, onions and potatoes in autumn, snow from November. Farmers open shops and cafés, run stays for visitors and sell direct from roadside stalls, and many households now take income from both fields and tourism. The television drama filmed here left a lasting local pride and a run of small museums and preserved sets in the woods east of town.

Winter changes the town's population as much as its weather. Ski instructors, seasonal staff and visitors arrive at Kitanomine, including a steady number from Australia and elsewhere in Asia, though on a smaller scale than Niseko. Hot springs in the hills are the standard way to end a day in any season, with the usual etiquette — wash first, no swimwear, keep quiet — expected of everyone.

Just over 20,000 people live in Furano, and the number has been falling for decades as young people leave for Sapporo and Tokyo and the population ages. The town serves a wider basin of farming villages, and its hospital, schools and shops are the ones those villages use.

Agriculture is the base of the economy: onions, potatoes, wheat, carrots, soybeans, dairy and the melons the district is known for, grown on large, mechanised holdings by Japanese standards. Processing adds to it, through the town's cheese factory and winery and through the wine and juice made from local fruit. Tourism provides the rest, sharply concentrated in July and in the ski months, and many businesses employ seasonal staff twice a year.

Daily life follows the fields and the snow. Work starts early in summer, when light comes before four in the morning, and winter means clearing snow from drives and roofs and driving on ice. The quiet months of May and November are when the town feels most itself. Local concerns are those of rural Hokkaido — depopulation, finding successors for farms, keeping rail services and hospitals, and managing visitor pressure on a landscape that is somebody's working crop.

Furano eats what it grows, and its best-known dish was invented to show that off. Furano omu-curry is a rice omelette served with curry, made to a set of local rules — the rice is grown in the basin, the vegetables come from the district, the plate includes cheese or wine or another Furano product, and it comes with a glass of local milk. A group of restaurants in town serve their own versions.

Dairy and produce run through everything else. The town's cheese factory makes soft and hard cheeses, butter and ice cream, some of it flavoured with squid ink or wine; melons from the basin are sold as gifts and eaten as soft serve; sweetcorn is grilled in summer, potatoes steamed with butter, and asparagus eaten in a short spring season. Onions from the valley go into curry, soup and Hokkaido-style stews.

The winery on the hill produces red, white and sparkling wine from cold-resistant grapes, alongside grape juice, and is sold across the island. Otherwise the food is Hokkaido's: soup curry, jingisukan lamb grilled on a domed pan, ramen — Asahikawa's soy-based bowl is the nearest tradition — and hotpots in winter. Roadside stations and farm stalls are the cheapest and freshest place to buy any of it.