Oh-arai – Hitachi-ohta (大洗 – 常陸太田) 39km

The man next to me in one of the ferry’s communal dormitories had some kind of sleep disorder, and kept me awake for half the night talking, walking around and even singing. He was so noisy that eventually I gathered up my things and moved to the next room, although he soon sleepwalked in to join me, and come the morning was complaining that his wallet had been stolen, when what he had almost certainly done was to leave it somewhere on his nocturnal wanderings.

After breakfast I got talking to Mr Pure Hemp Spine, who was originally from Osaka but now lived in Tsukuba. He worked for ten months of the year on events and exhibitions as a carpenter, he said, and spent the remaining two months on holiday, this being his twentieth time in Hokkaido. Even though it was ten in the morning he was already on the beers, because, as he explained, a friend was coming to pick him up from the ferry terminal and would drive him and his bicycle back to Tsukuba.

‘To be honest I probably carry a little too much luggage with me,’ said Mr Pure Hemp Spine. ‘I’ve even got a ukelele. The most unusual thing I ever saw, though, was a cyclist who was in Hokkaido to pan for gold. He had all of the tools with him – you know, the sieve thing and so on – and they were really heavy, too.’
‘Had he found any gold, then?’
‘He had but it wasn’t much – not enough to pay for the holiday, anyway.’

Having disembarked from the ferry at Oh-arai I stopped to make one final call to Mrs M, this time pretending that I was at the Ainu museum in Shiraoi. Because she has aunts, uncles and cousins all over this part of the prefecture, I planned my route to her parents’ house so as to avoid being spotted, and a couple of hours later she came to the front door to find me back a day early: not as tanned as expected, perhaps, but a couple of kilos slimmer and marginally more proficient in Japanese than when I had set off five weeks before.

Muroran – Tomakomai (室蘭 – 苫小牧) 72km

Muroran is only fifty kilometres or so from Tomakomai, from which I planned to catch a ferry back to Ibaraki in the evening, so along the way I paid a visit to the Porotokotan Ainu museum in Shiraoi Town.

The Ainu have lived in Hokkaido, northern Honshu and on islands in the Sea of Okhotsk for the best part of a thousand years, and while they were never subject to the kind of ill treatment inflicted on Native Americans or Australian Aborigines, for example, they were effectively treated as second-class citizens for long periods of time, and are even now more likely to be dependent on social security and to drop out of the education system before entering university.

Conversely, the Ainu language is still comparatively visible, even if very few people actually speak it. For example, on the computer I am using to write this blog entry – a 2006 MacBook with OS 10.6.8 – there is an Ainu character input option in the system preferences language menu, and around 80% of the place names in Hokkaido – along with many more in northern Honshu – are of Ainu origin. The reason I came across so many bizarre place names over the course of the summer (‘centre buttocks island’, ‘increased hair town’ and so on), is that the Japanese decided – somewhat arbitrarily, it would seem – to render their phonetic Ainu pronunciations in kanji. Shiraoi (白老), for example, means ‘place of many horseflies’ in Ainu, while its kanji mean ‘white elderly’; Sapporo (札幌) means ‘big dry river’ in Ainu and ‘note awning’ in Japanese, and Muroran (室蘭) means ‘small hill’ in Ainu and ‘room orchid’ in Japanese.

Estimates as to the number of Ainu living in Japan vary greatly, with the official population at between twenty and thirty thousand, and the unofficial one at ten times that. The greatest concentration of Ainu, though, is here in the southern part of Hokkaido, and Porotokotan is a recreation of a traditional settlement, with thatched houses, a botanical garden and a statue of the village chief.

While the Ainu were not officially recognised by the Japanese authorities as an indigenous people until 2008, some of their traditions were registered as protected cultural assets as far back as 1984, and are performed regularly for visitors to the museum.

Today’s show was introduced by a charismatic young man in traditional costume, who had a good line in patter and some basic conversational ability in several different languages, although for the benefit of parties of tourists from China and Singapore, two interpreters were also translating what he said into Cantonese and Mandarin.

Among other things, he talked about the Ainu religion, which resembles Shinto in that everything is said to possess a spirit, including rivers, trees and so on, but also natural phenomena, household objects and even diseases. All creatures are considered sacred, and spiritual purity can be gained by releasing fish, birds and so on from captivity.

A traditional Ainu dance revolved around the building’s central hearth, with the participants rolling their tongues and brandishing swords, and there were two musical performances, one on a small, zither-like stringed instrument, and the other on something called a mukkuri, which worked very much like a Jew’s harp. The latter performance was quite spellbinding, and sounded like a cross between nineties trance and classical minimalism, although despite buying a mukkuri at the souvenir shop, I have to admit that I failed to tease anything even remotely musical – let alone spellbinding – from it.

At a Seicomart just up the road I met a man who was originally from America, but with his big white beard looked so much like Father Christmas on a day off that I shall christen him Mr Lapland.

‘This is my fourteenth time in Hokkaido,’ said Mr Lapland. ‘I bought a Chinese-made tent because it was cheaper than the Japanese ones, and I cook my own food.’
‘I guess that saves you some money,’ I said.
‘It does, although there’s nothing much to do on a campsite so it’s mainly to keep me occupied in the evenings.’

Noticing Mr Lapland’s flip-flops, I asked if he didn’t have anything slightly more durable to wear on his feet.
‘Nope. I realised pretty quickly these are the most practical thing there is – it doesn’t matter if they get wet, right?’
‘That’s true,’ I said, and wished I had thought of the same thing myself, instead of spending the summer either avoiding rain altogether or wrapping my only semi-waterproof hiking shoes in plastic bags.
‘Actually this is just what I ride in,’ continued Mr Lapland. ‘I’ve got a different set of clothes for the evening – gotta keep the mosquitoes away from your ankles, after all – although I also found that it’s difficult to do your laundry properly when you’re camping, so when my pants [editor’s note: he means trousers] get dirty I just throw them away and buy a new pair.’
‘Where are you going today?’
‘Towards Muroran. How about you?’
‘Tomakomai. I’m getting the ferry back this evening.’
‘Really? I’ll let you into a secret – another thing I’ve learned over the years is that clockwise is best.’
‘Why’s that?’
‘Well, you’re always on the side of the road that’s closest to the sea, so you get an unobstructed view.’

Mr Lapland had a point: like the British, the Japanese drive on the left, so it makes sense to go clockwise around the island if you’re following the coast road, not to mention being safer – after all, how many times had I had to dart across two lanes of traffic to get a better look at a beach, an island or a sunset? Yes, as it turned out, all this time I had been going the wrong way round.

Then again, if I had gone clockwise around Hokkaido instead of anti-clockwise, I would almost certainly never have met Mr Big Bridge, Mr Village Middle, Mr Small Field, Mr Safe Wisteria, Mr Cedar Mountain, Mr Flower Field, Mr Warehouse, Mr Assistant Wisteria or Mr Crocodile Field, and it struck me now that this cycle tour was a rather neat metaphor for life itself, in the sense that depending on arbitrary decisions such as which way to turn at a T-junction, where to stop and where to stay, where to eat and where to drink, how far to ride and how long to rest, like a computer model for chaos theory, where one ends up, what one ends up doing and who one ends up meeting can change completely, and not just that day or that night, but many weeks hence and hundreds, even thousands of kilometres down the road.

Somehow I had found myself at Cape Erimo in the fog, on Route 142 in glorious sunshine, at Cape Sohya in a gale, in the Sarobetsu national park with a tailwind, on the road to Kuromatsunai in the pitch dark, above Lake Kussharo with the perfect lake view, on Mount Hakodaté with the perfect night view, on the Godzilla Rock in Shiretoko, on the Swan Bridge in a sports car, and in a Seicomart car park with a Father Christmas lookalike. And in much the same way, somehow I had found myself quitting my job in London, moving to Tokyo, relocating to Ibaraki, meeting Mrs M, getting married and living happily ever after, and even if it did all happen by chance, even if the whole algorithm could have changed with the addition of a single digit or the subtraction of a single decimal point, even if the whole galaxy had spun in a different direction with a different combination of stars and a different configuration of planets, I wouldn’t have it any other way.

Speaking of which, over the past few days I had concocted a plan to surprise Mrs M by returning in time for her birthday on 1st September, and when I called her from the ferry I pretended that I was still camped beside Lake Tohya, all the while praying there would be no announcements over the PA system that might give away my true location.

Up on deck I took a photo of the sunset, and standing next to me doing the same thing was Mr Mountain Middle, who was on his way back from a five-day surfing holiday with two friends.
‘To be honest we didn’t have a lot of time for surfing,’ he said. ‘The ferry takes about twenty hours and it was another four hours’ drive to the beach. The waves were good, though, and we got to surf with schools of salmon that were on their way back to Hokkaido to lay their eggs.’

Mr Mountain Middle lived in Kashima in the south of Ibaraki and ran two interior design businesses (Bamboo Design Biz and Angin Furniture and Design), among other things importing furniture from Bali, where he had lived for a year. He had also spent a year in Australia and a year on Ohshima, an island in the Pacific south of Tokyo.
‘I worked as a waiter in a hostess bar,’ he said. ‘But most of the people who live there are older, so I was single the whole time. Actually it’s not that much different in Kashima. Because I’ve travelled a lot I’m seen as a bit of an outsider – plus there’s the san-busu, of course.’
‘San-busu?’ I said. ‘What’s that?’
 ‘In English it means “the three uglies”. The san-busu are Nagoya, Mito and Sendai – that’s where all of the ugly women in Japan are: Aichi, Ibaraki and Miyagi.’

Considering the fact that I had married a girl from Ibaraki and that one of my best friends lives in and is married to a girl from Nagoya, I might have taken offence at this, although it does have at least some basis in fact: in feudal times, clan leaders were in the habit of taking all of the beautiful women with them when they were relocated to another part of the country.

Also, once I had seen him in action, Mr Mountain Middle’s sob story about being a lonely bachelor seemed even more likely to be fictional than that of the san-busu. As we were queuing for our buffet dinner, he started chatting up one of the waitresses, and continued to badger her without the slightest hint of embarrassment for the rest of the time we were in the cafeteria. OK, so he never did get her phone number, but I couldn't imagine it would be long before him and his surfer dude buddies – both of whom also claimed to be single – would find some women to accompany them on their next trip to the beach.

Oshamanbé  – Muroran (長万部 – 室蘭) 101km

Even at sea level the fog was thick, and it made a pea soup look like a fine consommé at the top of the Rebungé Pass, where I encountered this mysterious figure.

Mr Mountain Mouth was walking the length of Japan at a pace of thirty to forty kilometres a day, sleeping rough for the most part and with 15kg of luggage on his back. I thought of telling him to pop in at the in-laws’ barbershop on his way through Ibaraki, but realised there would be no point, as he had, so he explained, been cultivating his dreadlocks for five years. (The following March, Mr Mountain Mouth sent me – and presumably everyone else he had met along the way – a postcard from Okinawa to say that he had successfully completed his 2833km trip.)

I stopped for lunch at a Seicomart, where another customer was doing his best to supplement the fog with exhaust fumes, a habit that is known in Japan as ‘idling’ – ie. leaving the engine running even when one’s car is stationary.

It is no exaggeration to say that from when they leave the house to whenever they get back again, no Japanese person ever switches their car engine off under any circumstances. In fact, many turn it on in readiness ten or fifteen minutes in advance, and don’t turn it off again until everything and everyone is unloaded and back indoors at the end of their trip. If, therefore, you happen to be a car thief, Japan is very much the place to be, as there is no need to hot-wire the ignition, pick the lock or even break a window, and even top-of-the-range models will be left with the engine ticking over, warmed up and ready to steal.

A reasonable argument for ‘idling’ is that in winter there is a danger that your car might not start again when you get back in. Even with the temperature below freezing and several metres of snow on the ground, though, Japanese cars are still the most efficient in the world, and five minutes in the cold is hardly likely to damage them beyond repair or necessitate being towed to the nearest garage by an AA van. Conversely, in the heat of summer it can be advantageous to have the cooler on in readiness for when one returns to one’s car, but there is rarely a need for this in temperate Hokkaido, and in any case, this particular offender – like so many others I have witnessed – had the windows rolled down.

At another convenience store in another part of Hokkaido on an equally balmy day, I had seen a mother leave her children in the car while she went shopping. One of them – who can’t have been more than six or seven years old – climbed into the driver’s seat and began revving the accellerator, and having noticed this, rather than switch off the engine like any sensible person, she merely opened the door, told him to stop and went back into the store.

One final incident that sticks in my mind was a family who parked their car next to the beach in Minato-machi and spent the entire evening watching the on-board DVD player, all the while with the engine running and the temperature outside warm enough that I was wearing shorts and a t-shirt. (Did they have the cooler on, I wondered, or the heating? Or perhaps neither? Or even both? Or was the DVD player so power-hungry that with no idling it would run down the car battery?). If nothing else, this reminded me of my fellow Brits, many of whom are fond of going for a day out at the beach and never once setting foot outside their cars, choosing instead to enjoy the view through a misty windscreen, over a flask of tea and some sandwiches.

At Lake Tohya in the Shikotsu-Tohya National Park, I enjoyed this view unobstructed by a misty windscreen and while eating a box of Choco Pie.

Not far from where I sat was Mount Usu, a live volcano which has erupted as recently as 1977 and 2000, although rather than its accompanying Volcano Science Museum, I was more interested in the temporary Eco Gallery next door.

Among other things the Eco Gallery showed how Japan is only 40% calorie self-sufficient, and that partly as a consequence of this, its food miles are the biggest (or should that be the furthest?) in the world – around three times greater than the US and Korea, for example. On average, a house built in Japan remains standing for just thirty years (as opposed to 55 in the US and 77 in the UK), and the Japanese use more than two hundred plastic bags per person per year, making for a total of around thirty billion. They also use around twenty-five billion sets of wari-bashi (割り箸 / disposable chopsticks) annually, which despite the wood and bamboo used to produce them being plentiful in Japan, are almost all imported from China.

At around the time I went on this tour, it was fashionable to carry ‘my hashi’ – ie. ‘my chopsticks’ – for use instead of wari-bashi at restaurants and the like. In the manner of a samurai with his sword, I would un-sheath my my hashi from their special scabbard almost every day, but while even now I still carry a set in my man-bag – and despite China having imposed an eco-friendly tax on the wari-bashi it exports – I am quite possibly the only person left in the entire country who does so.

(A note on Japanese usage for those of you who are interested in that kind of thing: the counter for chopsticks is zen / 膳, so one set is ichi-zen / 一膳, two sets are ni-zen / 二膳, and so on.)

Just as I was about to take a roadside pee on my way into Muroran, the driver of a flash-looking sports car pulled over and introduced himself as Mr Crocodile Field.

‘Is everything OK?’ he asked.
‘Of course. I was just, er, taking a quick break. Your English is very good – where did you learn?’
‘I’ve travelled a lot. Europe, India, Vietnam - I spent a year in Thailand and my Thai lessons were in English, which helped.’
Mr Crocodile Field’s own man-bag was in the ‘ethnic’ style, and he told me that he ran a company importing fabrics.
‘I’m thinking of moving into antiques, though,’ he said, 'so I’ve just been to a viewing for an auction. European antiques are too expensive, so I’m going to concentrate on Japanese ones instead.’

Upon finding out that Mr Crocodile Field lived in Muroran, I suggested that we meet up for a drink later, but he told me that it would be difficult as he was driving, so we said our farewells and I cycled on through the suburbs.

When I arrived at Muroran Youth Hostel a couple of hours later, however, Mr Crocodile Field was waiting for me in reception.
‘You took your time!’ he said, and once I had checked in and unpacked, we got into his car and went out for a teetotal evening meal.

Over a succession of exotic seafood dishes, none of which we knew the English translations for, Mr Crocodile Field told me of his fondness for reading Sherlock Holmes, listening to Enya and smoking roll-ups (he imported the Rizlas himself, he said), and of how he modelled his hairstyle on Ewan McGregor’s in The Phantom Menace.

On the way back to the youth hostel we crossed the 1380 metre-long Swan Bridge over Muroran Bay, where the road was almost empty.

‘This car is good to drive,’ said Mr Crocodile Field. ‘But it can be dangerous if an old woman is crossing the street.’ By way of demonstration he stepped on the accellerator and harangued an imaginary pedestrian. ‘Why are you crossing the road, lady? Get out of my way!’

To be honest, Mr Crocodile Field’s driving was erratic at best, and even after nearly five weeks of being passed by cars and trucks on narrow roads, in dark tunnels, through high winds and the heavy rain, I can honestly say that I never felt as vulnerable or as concerned for my safety as I did in Mr Crocodile Field’s sports car. And that is the fundamental irony of travel, I thought to myself later: the faster the mode of transport we are using, the more impatient we become. Mr Mountain Mouth, for example, probably never found himself in a hurry during his entire eight-month hike from one end of Japan to the other, but how many of us have sat in an airport departure lounge bemoaning the fact that our flight – which will whisk us away to our destination at several hundred kilometres per hour – has been delayed?

Hakodate – Oshamambé  (函館 – 長万部) – 122km

Sleeping on the futon next to mine at the Limelight rider house was Mr Mountain Field, a seventy-two year old with a ZZ Top beard whose – possibly self-coined – nickname was sen-nin (仙人 / Buddhist hermit).
‘My wife and I run our own rider house down near Nagoya,’ he told me. ‘Our water comes straight from a mountain spring and we’ve even got a goémon-buro. You should come and stay some time.’

Mr Mountain Field had walked the Shikoku-henro a couple of years ago, he said, but decided to come to Hokkaido on a 50cc scooter, along the way customising it with a pair of deer antlers. The outside wall of the Limelight, meanwhile, was adorned with two railway platform signs, one of which had been auctioned off when Hakodaté station was refurbished a couple of years previously, while the other had been custom made with the word ‘Limelight’ as the station name.

Refreshed after my rest day I reeled off the kilometres and by early evening had made it all the way to Oshamambé (among other things, I spotted this bicycle graveyard along the way).

The weather was halfway between foggy and drizzly and I put up my tent at dusk, at a campsite with an ornamental pond as its centerpiece and a stream running through it. In other words, these were optimum conditions for maximum mossie disruption, and despite wearing a hat, long trousers, raincoat, gloves, mosquito repellent and a towel around my face, bandit style, I still managed to get bitten on my ankle, my finger (I had to take off the gloves for a split second to adjust the guy ropes) and even my ear.

Instead of being able to soothe the bites in the bath, though, I ended up at an onsen that wasn’t so much hot spring as volcanic inferno, and whose interior resembled a scene from Journey To The Centre Of The Earth, with every available surface encrusted with limescale or stalactites (goodness only knows what the inside of their kitchen kettle must have looked like). The water – which as the receptionist informed me bubbled up from the ground at around forty-four degrees centigrade – was an uninviting rusty orange colour, and in one corner of the room cascaded from a pipe in the ceiling that was supposed to be a massage waterfall but functioned more as a kind of torture device.

At an okonomiyaki restaurant across the road the only other customers were a mother and her eight-year-old son, Mr Thorough.
‘He's been studying English with one of the teachers at his elementary school,’ said the mother as she grabbed his head and twisted it to face me.

Despite having been coerced into conversation, though, Mr Thorough was a more proficient English speaker than a lot of the teenagers I teach. His ambition, he said, was to be a vet, and as well as two pet cats – one of whom had originally been a stray – he kept a lizard and a beetle, both of which he had caught himself.

Mr Thorough told me that he usually cleaned out the cat litter in the evening and went to bed early, but as I was leaving, his mother – who had just ordered another beer – said that he could take the day off tomorrow.

The owner of the restaurant lent me a katori-senkoh (蚊取り線香 / mosquito coil) to take back to the campsite, although I have to admit that after partaking of a couple of beers myself, when I woke in the middle of the night needing a pee, I opted to use a plastic bottle rather than venture outside and risk being bitten somewhere far more awkward than my ear.

Hakodaté (函館) – rest day

Every available inch of floor and wall space has been given over to futons and bunk beds in the Limelight rider house’s tiny dormitories, and in mine, quite apart from the chorus of snoring, the light was on until two or three in the morning while another guest was reading manga, and at the crack of dawn came the chime from that most objectionable of devices, an alarm-clock-with-snooze-feature.

In the old days, if one had to get up at a particular time the following morning, one utilised a wind-up alarm clock with a tiny swinging hammer and two bells on the top, which when it sounded was loud enough to rouse not just the neighbours, but quite possibly the neighbours’ neighbours as well. Nowadays, though, one is blessed with alarm clocks that go off at the allotted time, but which allow one to then poke one’s hand out from beneath the duvet and press the ‘snooze’ button. A few minutes later the alarm sounds again and the process is repeated, ad infinitum or until one decides that enough is enough and that one really should get out of bed if one isn’t going to be late for work / school / one’s appointment at the job centre.

Now, correct me if I’m wrong – and some readers of this blog who are fond of and / or reliant on the snooze feature may disagree with me here – but if, from the outset, it is perfectly feasible for you to get up an hour later than the initial time at which your alarm goes off, then WHY THE BLOODY HELL DIDN’T YOU SET YOUR STUPID BLOODY ALARM-CLOCK-WITH-SNOOZE-FEATURE TO GO OFF AN HOUR LATER IN THE FIRST BLOODY PLACE!!! Instead of being woken up stupidly early, and then every five minutes for the following hour, why not allow yourself – and anyone else who happens to be sleeping in the same room as you – ANOTHER HOUR OF PEACEFUL, UNINTERRUPTED SLEEP, YOU COMPLETE AND UTTER SMEGHEAD!!!

But anyway, my tiredness was counteracted at least partly by a breakfast of homemade bread and fresh coffee, which I savoured while sitting at the kitchen table, chatting to the other guests, watching TV and petting the Limelight’s official canine mascots, Mitsu and Lime.

The talk that morning was of the tabéhohdai (食べ放題 / all-you-can-eat) deals that are a speciality of the restaurants in Hakodaté. One group of cyclists was thinking of tackling a tabéhohdai that requires the consumption of two kilos of food (per person, that is) in twenty minutes. If a diner manages this, as well as getting the food itself for free, he or she is presented with ten kilos of potatoes – a somewhat ungainly prize for a touring cyclist, it has to be said.

Another group was contemplating the six-kilos-of-curry (not per person, I assume) challenge at Lucky Pierrot, a famous restaurant where I ended up having lunch, although I settled for a more modest and easily digestible scallop burger, fries and milkshake.

This was only my second proper day off of the entire trip, and among other things I finally got round to buying a padded seat cover, which made it feel like I was settling back into an arm chair after four weeks sat on a rusty spike. I also sent a roll cake and some ‘fresh’ caramel – fashionable Hokkaido specialities at the time – to Mrs M and her family, from a shopping arcade that occupies some attractively refurbished brick-and-wrought-iron buildings on the quayside. In the suburbs above the harbour, meanwhile, the architecture was colonial and the streets San Francisco-style: straight and sloping.

At a convenience store near the station I bumped into Mr Warehouse, who was waiting to catch a ferry to the mainland (a couple of months later he emailed to say that having been converted to The Way Of The Glove, he too had completed his Quest for one hundred Gloves), and back at the Limelight the manageress was busy having the same telephone conversation with a succession of prospective guests.
‘Where are you now? And how many of you are there? I see. Do you know the way? OK, we’ll be waiting for you. If you get lost then do call again, won’t you?’

She and her partner supplemented our supermarket-bought food with edamamé, octopus, squid, mackerel, crisps, satsumas and chocolate. We were also provided with shohchu from a plastic bottle at just ten yen a shot, and partly because of this, one guest fell asleep on the floor before the end of the evening – you can see him in this picture, along with the aforementioned manageress, manager, Mitsu and Lime.

Fukushima – Hakodaté (福島 – 函館) – 78km

Mrs Wisteria Mountain treated me to a truly epic breakfast of rice, fried eggs, pickles, spinach, miso soup, prawn and asparagus stir-fry, milk, yoghurt, Yakult, potato salad, tomatoes, raw squid and grilled salmon. As well as asking if I wanted seconds (although it was rude of me, I had to turn her down on this one), she discounted my bill, re-filled my water bottle and sent me on my way with a packed lunch of hand-made rice balls (if it wasn’t for the fact that I’m vegetarian, she said, she would have thrown in some sausages and pork cutlets, too).

On the other side of the Fukushima Pass a scooter rider flagged me down and introduced himself as Mr Border from the guesthouse restaurant in Hamatonbetsu on Day 20.
‘I was supporting that group of long-distance runners,’ he said. ‘I handed out food and drinks and gave them massages by the side of the road if they were suffering from cramp, although I was cycling instead of jogging.’
‘How come you’re on a scooter, then?’ I asked him.
‘Oh, I gave the bicycle away once the race was over. I have to go all the way back to Ibaraki so I figured this would be quicker.’

On the coast road towards Hakodaté I was confronted with a headwind to match the one that myself and Mr Border’s running team had had to deal with on the way to Cape Sohya, and was soon restricted to grinding my way along at little more than walking pace. When I finally caught up with Mr Warehouse in Hakodaté, he told me that despite cycling from Fukushima Town in identical conditions he had arrived several hours before me, and even found the time to go and give blood.
‘If I’d lost half a litre of blood after that ride I’d have ended up in a coma,’ I said.
‘They give you free drinks and sweets, you know, and anyway I’m used to it – that makes twenty-eight times in all.’
‘Since when?’
‘Since as soon as I was old enough,’ he said, showing me his blood donor record card. ‘I’ve already been six times on this tour and my ambition is to make it to a hundred.’

We had arranged to meet at the top of Mount Hakodaté, from which the view at night is renowned – among the Japanese, at least – as one of the most beautiful in the world.

‘Back home in Okayama there are seven of us living in the same house together,’ said Mr Warehouse as we were on our way back down the mountain. ‘Me, my grandparents, my mum and dad, my younger sister and her son.’
‘You've got a nephew? How old is he?’
‘He's five now. My sister got married when she was still a teenager, but her husband spent all of his money on hostesses and in the end she kicked him out. That’s when they moved back in with us.’
‘Doesn’t it get a bit crowded?’
‘It does a bit, but my grandparents like having their grandson around.’
‘You’re not in a hurry to have kids yourself, I take it.’
‘Actually I’d like to start a family soon. I've been going out with the same girl for about a year and a half now, and when I’m at home we see each other most days. She’s pretty laid back so we just like hanging out, really – you know, sleeping late, going shopping, that kind of thing. She comes to cheer me on when I have a soccer game and I watch her when she plays hockey. Since I’ve been on this tour, though, I only call her about once a month. If it was more than that I think we’d start to miss each other – plus it would be too expensive.'
‘She doesn’t mind it when you go away hiking and cycling, then?’
‘Of course she does! She didn’t want me to go on this tour at all, but I just ignored her and went anyway.’

Esashi – Fukushima (江差 – 福島) – 88km

The ridge that runs along the centre of the Matsumaé Peninsula rises to a thousand metres above sea level, and mountainsides lush with foliage stretched up and away to my left beside the coast road. As far as I could tell the forest was unmanaged, and it wasn’t unreasonable to suppose that no human being had ever set foot even a few metres inland from where I was now riding.

As I sat in a layby eating my mid-morning snack, a young man rode past on the kind of bicycle you might expect a  teenager to receive as a birthday present – a small-scale mountain bike with a heavy frame and a garish logo – and I caught up with him at a Seicomart a little further up the road.

From Okayama Prefecture in western Honshu, Mr Warehouse had quit his job as a motorcycle mechanic three years ago and been on various adventures since, including two months spent hiking the 1500km Shikoku-henro (四国遍路) temple pilgrimage.

‘When I left Okayama in March there was still snow on the mountains,’ he said. ‘I’ve been to Kyushu, Shikoku and all along the Pacific coast to Hokkaido. Now and then I’ll stay somewhere for a few weeks and do a part-time job to save some money, and the plan is to make it back home before Christmas.’
‘How’s your body coping with all of that riding?’ I asked him (my saddle sore had been getting steadily worse over the past couple of weeks).
‘Fine – no pain, no problems! I’ve been in football clubs ever since I was at elementary school so I’m used to getting a lot of exercise.’

I suggested to Mr Warehouse that we ride together towards Cape Shirakami – the southernmost point in Hokkaido and the final goal on my circumnavigation – and along the way he mentioned that he had also been on a two-week tour of Holland.
‘I wanted to see Ajax and PSV Eindhoven play,’ he said. ‘It was fantastic – I couldn’t speak any Dutch but I got by on a lot of gestures and a few words of English.’

Mr Warehouse was so strong that it soon became apparent we were a mis-match: despite what ought to have been an inefficient riding style – he stood up on the pedals almost the entire time, even when we weren’t going uphill – he seemed to sail along with ease while I laboured over every pedal stroke (let’s face it, this could also have had something to do with the fact that he was ten years younger than me).

‘How do you manage to go so fast?’ I asked him when we stopped to look around Matsumaé Castle.
‘I’ve had the same bike since I was fifteen so I guess I’m just used to it,’ he said. ‘I didn’t do any training before I left Okayama and I haven’t had a single puncture in about six months. I am on my third set of tyres, mind you.’

Having bowed to his physical superiority I suggested that it might be better if we parted ways, and continued south at a rather more stately pace. Just as it had at Cape Sohya in the far north of the island, a strong wind swirled around Cape Shirakami – or rather, strong winds: when I arrived there the clouds were scudding one way, the flags fluttering another, and the waves breaking in a different direction altogether.

I eventually caught up with Mr Warehouse again in Fukushima Town (not to be confused with Fukushima Prefecture, which is several hundred kilometres to the south east), just as it was beginning to get dark.

On a previous tour of Hokkaido, he told me, he had stayed in rider houses, but this time was restricting himself to a budget of just 300 yen a day, and about to settle in for the night at an – admittedly rather spacious and well-appointed – bus shelter. His routine involved rising at 4am, setting off at 6am, stopping at 4pm and going to sleep at 7pm, and having noticed during the course of the day that his diet consisted almost exclusively of rice balls and dried fish, I treated him to a can of chuh-hai (alcopops) and a box of Pocky before seeking out a place to stay for myself.

‘This Saturday,’ said Mrs Wisteria Mountain, the proprietor of a nearby ryokan, ‘some celebrities are swimming between Hokkaido and Aomori for 24-Hour Television. I’ve got sixty TV people coming to stay and we’ll be chock-a-block - actually it’s against the safety regulations so don’t tell anyone!’

While I didn’t ask – and although, as she explained, she had three children and four grandchildren – I had the feeling Mrs Wisteria Mountain was a widow and would have been lonely without some guests to talk to.
‘Everyone likes it here because the food’s good and we give you lots of it,’ she boasted, and proceeded to ply me with more than I could possibly eat, including kimuchi (spicy, fermented cabbage from Korea) hot-pot, stir-fried asparagus and ooni （sea urchin) omelette.

‘We’ve been in business for thirty years,’ she continued. ‘We used to run the place as a hostess bar and there were girls from all over the place working here – Filipinos, Brazilians, Czechs. That was when the Seikan Tunnel was being built, but once that was finished there weren’t as many customers and we moved over to being an ordinary ryokan instead. The shinkansen (新幹線 / bullet train) should be coming soon, though, so hopefully things will start to pick up again.’

The Seikan Tunnel (青函トンネル) runs beneath the Tsugaru Straits between northern Honshu and Hokkaido, and at just over 53km was for two decades or so the longest tunnel of any kind in the world. Due to its enormous budget and high maintenance costs, however, and along with the fact that in the twenty-seven years it took to complete it was rendered at least partially obsolete by cheaper air travel, the tunnel was seen by many as a white elephant (actually not just a white elephant: a total of thirty-four workers lost their lives during its construction).

While rail passengers may not be plentiful, though, the tunnel has become an essential route for shipping freight to and from Hokkaido, and more to the point, was constructed with a view to one day being able to accommodate the shinkansen. At the time of writing, work is already underway to make the necessary upgrades, and the first shinkansen should pass through the tunnel on its way to Hakodaté in 2015, with a view to extending the service further north to Sapporo by 2035.

(Incidentally, you may or may not be interested to know that the celebrities on 24-Hour Television failed in their attempt to swim across the Tsugaru Straits, although they did raise plenty of money for charity in the process.)

Setana – Esashi (せたな – 江差) 91km

A short ferry ride from Setana lies Okushiri-toh (奥尻島 / literally ‘centre buttocks island’ – yes, as usual, your guess is as good as mine), which on the night of 12th July 1993 was witness to one of Japan’s worst natural disasters of recent times.

Following a 7.8-magnitude earthquake just off the coast, within three minutes the island was hit by the first wave of a tsunami, and just seven minutes after that by a second, even bigger wave. 233 people lost their lives – some as far afield as Aomori in northern Honshu and Russia on the other side of the Japan Sea – and among the dead were 4% of Okushiri’s population.

(There's some news footage of the aftermath about a minute and a half into this video - which is in Japanese - and then at various points throughout.)

At the bottom the Wikipedia page about the disaster – which is known officially as the Hokkaido Nansei-oki Earthquake (北海道南西沖地震) and colloquially as the Okushiri Earthquake – there is a section about what was learned as a result, the salient points of which are as follows:

- Even if it were possible to speed up the transmission of tsunami warnings, depending on the location of an earthquake’s epicentre, the fact that some warnings will not arrive in time is unavoidable.
- If people who live in coastal areas feel the tremors from a large earthquake, they should evacuate to higher ground or the tops of tall buildings straight away, and without waiting for tsunami warnings.
- Depending on their location, tsunami can be higher than predicted, hit many times over, and subesequent waves from a tsunami are sometimes higher than the initial one.

The tragedy is that despite these lessons having supposedly been ‘learned’ after the Okushiri Earthquake, by the time of the Great East Japan Earthquake in 2011, the Japanese people, the authorities and the so-called ‘experts’ had for a long time been underestimating not just the probability of something similar happening elsewhere in the country, but perhaps more importantly, its scale.

For example, the largest wave from the tsunami caused by the Okushiri Earthquake in 1993 (or to be more specific, the highest point above sea level that was inundated by waves from the tsunami) was thirty metres, while the largest wave from the tsunami caused by the Great East Japan Earthquake in 2011 was forty metres.

In both cases, many people died because they either failed to evacuate to higher ground, because they evacuated by car and were caught in traffic jams, because the coming tsunami was estimated in official warnings as being no more than a few metres high, because in some areas, the tsunami arrived within just ten minutes of the earthquake, and because the initial waves from the tsunami were not necessarily its highest.

Much more so than western Hokkaido, the north-east coast of Honshu has a long history of off-shore earthquakes, including some within living memory. For example, the largest wave from the tsunami caused by the Shohwa-sanriku Earthquake (昭和三陸地震) in 1933 was twenty-eight metres high.

In the same way that residential areas are now in the process of being moved to higher ground in Tohoku, laws were introduced after the Sanriku quake in an effort to prevent people from building houses on low-lying ground that might be vulnerable to tsunami. Sadly, though, these laws were never properly enforced, and many of the same communities which had been destroyed in 1933 were destroyed all over again in 2011.

The weather in Setana wasn’t at all conducive to boarding a ferry, so instead of going to Okushiri I struggled on down the coast in the wind and rain.

That evening the owner of the Tsuji Ryokan gave me a map of Esashi with all of the town’s restaurants and bars marked on it, and I followed a roundabout route through the deserted backstreets on the way to and from my evening meal at a local izakaya.

Kuromatsunai – Setana (黒松内 – せたな)

Because a strong wind had whipped up overnight, packing the bike turned into a silent film-style comedy routine, in that every time I leaned over to pick something up it blew away and had me chasing around the campsite after it. The wind was so strong, in fact, that on the descent from a mountain pass above Kuromatsunai I reached my top speed of the summer, a quite literally eye-watering 63kph. For some reason, Mrs M wasn’t particularly impressed with this statistic when I told her about it on the phone, and instead started going on about the importance of road safety.

As the skies darkened in late afternoon I called in at a local shop on the coast road, where the doormat triggered a ping-pong chime and an old lady wearing the ubiquitous pinny appeared from the back room.
‘We don’t have a very big shop, I’m afraid,’ she said, and when I settled on buying an ice cream, totted up my change on a soroban (算盤 / abacus). ‘In the old days everyone used these, although in my case it’s because my fingers aren’t nimble enough to use a calculator any more.’

She proceeded to tell me a similar story to the one I had been hearing all summer: of how the population of Hokkaido is ageing because as soon as they graduate from high school, young people go to Sapporo or the mainland (two of her grandchildren were watching TV in the back room, and presumably she was resigned to the prospect of them moving away at some point), and what business there was has diminished even further because of the recession, the price of petrol and so on.

As I stepped outside it had begun to rain, and a little further up the road I stopped to take this commemorative photograph.

On a previous tour I had noticed that for some reason, the roads in Japan are littered with discarded gloves, and before setting out this summer had decided to count the ones I saw along the way. After four weeks on the road I had reached my target of one hundred, and wondered as I took the picture what proportion of the gloves had been left and right hands, and supposing I had picked them up, how many complete pairs I would now have.

As I’m sure you can imagine, there’s plenty of time to think when you’re cycling all day, every day for weeks at a time, and in my more idle moments I had formulated a theory – you might even say a philosophy – regarding this glove counting pastime, which for want of a better phrase I shall christen The Way Of The Glove:

1) The Glove is more likely to be found in built up and / or industrialised areas, not in the countryside, and on main rather than secondary roads.
2) In 99% of cases The Glove will not be in the middle of the road or on the pavement, but in the gutter.
3) Do not pre-empt The Glove by trying to anticipate its appearance, for this will surely result in disappointment.
4) Conversely, you must not lose concentration in your quest for The Glove. The Glove will materialise when you least expect it, so you must, on a subconscious level, be aware of your surroundings and prepared for its appearance at all times.
5) Searching for The Glove on the opposite side of the road is not advisable, as this could result in The Seeker Of The Glove becoming distracted from their task and passing up a possible Glove-spotting opportunity directly in front of them.
6) You must not return to look for The Glove you thought was there but did not see clearly. This is a form of cheating and goes against The Way Of The Glove, which dictates that all Gloves must be observed from a moving bicycle while on one’s way to a specific destination further along the road.
7) In this sense, The Quest For The Glove can only be embarked upon as an incidental, secondary activity, and never as the primary goal of one’s journey.
8) Last but not least, if you sense that you are about to pass The Glove, you will pass The Glove! This is the essential mystery at the heart of The Way Of The Glove.

Like I say, there’s plenty of time – in fact, possibly too much time – to think when you’re on a cycle tour. (Oh, and for what it’s worth, among the many other roadside detritus I saw over the summer, used nappies came a very close second to gloves. As such, please look forward to a future blog post entitled The Way Of The Nappy.)

Day 27 – Auto House – Kuromatsunai (オートハウス – 黒松内) 129km

When I awoke the only other person up and about was the owner of the Auto House, whose portrait – a Che-Guevara-style image painted onto a large and now faded bed sheet – hung on one of the dormitory walls. Twenty-three years ago, he told me, he had travelled to Australia and stayed at a caravan park. Impressed with the idea of a place to stay that was cheaper than a hotel but more comfortable than a campsite, upon returning to Japan he created his own version, which instead of caravans has log cabins.

The Auto House thus became one of the first rider houses in Hokkaido, and as the economy – and in turn the tourist industry – boomed, within a few years there were more than five hundred on the island as a whole.

‘Nowadays, though,’ he said, ‘a lot of them are closing down. There aren’t as many tourists as there used to be, and like me, the people who run them are getting old. Plus there’s more competition. There’s a ski resort near here called Niseko and most of it is owned by Australians. They’ve built all of these self-catering condominiums which are open all year round – skiers and snowboarders use them in the winter and in the summer it’s hikers, kayakers and so on.’

At Bohyoh-nakayama michi-no-éki I caught my first glimpse of Mount Shiribetsu.

And my interest was piqued when this song - by a band called Aladdin - came over the PA system.

At first listen Hi Wa, Mata Noboru (陽は、また昇る / The Sun Will Rise Again) sounds like just another bouncy J-Pop tune, but the lyrics are in fact a comically over-the-top tribute to the awesomeness of Japan – a kind of funnier, alternative national anthem.

We'll keep on going forever

Do your best Japan, Japan you're great
Now's the time to stand up and be counted, Japan
Fly high, fly beautifully
To win back our pride
Office workers of Japan, fight for your country

When it feels like you're about to give in
Shout out
To rouse the hearts of the people you love
Never give up
And be prepared
When they're catching you up, when they're about to overtake you
Once more, Japan, country of pure gold
The sun will surely rise again
If you're smart, use your head
If you're strong, use your power
We'll keep on going forever

Do your best Japan, Japan you're great
Japan, you're smart
Instant noodles, canned coffee
Karaoké - we invented them all
Do your best Japan, Japan you're great
Fly high, fly beautifully
To win back our pride
Office workers of Japan, fight for your country

Your spirit is blazing
It will never go out
We built our passion together
So we can start building the future too
Don't blame it on anyone else
It's time to transform our society
One more time, Japan, country of pure gold
The sun will rise again
There may only be a few of us
We may only be a small country on a big planet
But we'll keep on going forever

Do your best Japan, Japan you're great
Japan, you're smart
The mechanical pencil, the bullet train
The endoscope - we invented them all
Do your best Japan, Japan you're great
Japan, you'll never give up
Fly high, fly beautifully
To win back our pride
Office workers of Japan, fight for your country

You can't survive on your own
We're here for you
We're here for you
We're in this together
Keep your spirits up
Spirits, spirits, keep your spirits up
Lets go!

Do your best, Japan
Japan, you're great
Japan, you're smart
The blue LED
Once upon a time, we even invented the baby turtle [translator's note: I have no idea what this lyric means, although the members of Aladdin are holding cuddly turtle toys when they sing it]
Do your best Japan, Japan, you're great
Now's the time to stand up and be counted, Japan
Fly high, fly beautifully
To win back our pride
Office workers of Japan, fight for your country

We'll keep on going forever

Later in the afternoon I spotted a fellow cyclist whose unzipped raincoat billowed out behind him like a cape. He introduced himself as Mr Flattery Department, and said that earlier in the week he had fallen ill with a temperature of 40°c (104°f). After taking a couple of days off and visiting the doctor, though, by this morning he had recovered sufficiently to get back on the road.

Originally from Yamanashi Prefecture, Mr Flattery Department was taking six months to cycle to Tokyo, and that night he planned to camp at Rankoshi michi-no-éki. I would have joined him if it wasn’t for the fact that, as usual, I hadn’t brought any food with me.

‘You have to be careful when you’re carrying your own food, though,’ he said.
‘You mean because of bears?’ I said.
‘Not just bears – I’ve had my food stolen by foxes twice now.’

Actually, to say that I was travelling without food isn’t strictly true – I had a half-full box of Choco Pie with me, which I donated to Mr Flattery Department to supplement his evening meal.