Hokkaido

The island was brought into the Japanese state only in the late nineteenth century, and once you know that, the landscape reads differently. The main city is a numbered grid rather than a tangle of lanes around a castle. The farms were planned with foreign advisers and still use silos, straight field boundaries and lines of windbreak trees you will not see further south. There are barns.

Underneath that layer is an older one: a great many of the rivers, mountains and towns carry Ainu names, transcribed into Japanese characters that often no longer mean anything in Japanese. Recognising a few of the recurring elements turns a list of unfamiliar place names into something legible. Do not come here looking for temples and castles — there are very few, and they are not the point. Come for the land and for how recently it was mapped.

Five days is the sensible minimum and it buys you one corner, not the island. The distances are the whole planning problem: Sapporo to Furano is around two hours by road, Sapporo to Hakodate about four, and Sapporo to the Shiretoko peninsula is a full day's drive whichever way you go. Anyone trying to see the lavender, the drift ice and the southern port on one week-long trip spends most of it in a car.

Three routes actually join up. The southern loop — Sapporo, Noboribetsu or Lake Toya, then Hakodate — is four to five days and the only one that works well on rails. The central loop — Sapporo, Asahikawa, Furano and Biei, Daisetsuzan — is four days and wants a car for the last two. The eastern route — Kushiro, Akan, Shiretoko, Abashiri — is six days, needs a car outright, and is the one worth flying into a regional airport for rather than driving across from Sapporo.

If you have three days, do not attempt a loop. Pick Sapporo plus one thing within two hours of it and accept that you have visited a city and its hinterland.

New Chitose Airport near Sapporo is the practical entry point, about an hour and a half from Haneda with flights all day. The Hokkaido Shinkansen only reaches Shin-Hakodate-Hokuto, so arriving by rail from Tokyo takes over four hours and still leaves you three and a half hours short of Sapporo by limited express. Within the island, trains link Sapporo with Hakodate, Asahikawa, Kushiro and Abashiri, but they are infrequent and the lines do not run to most of the national parks. Rent a car for anything beyond the main cities, budget far more driving time than the distances suggest, and check road conditions in winter — snow closes mountain passes from November into spring.

The rainy front that sits over most of Japan in early summer does not reach this far north, and that single fact makes early summer the most underrated window in the country. While Honshu is under warm cloud and humidity, this island is bright, comfortably in the low twenties, and green.

It is also before the domestic holiday rush, which lands in the middle of August and takes the rental cars with it. If you are choosing dates and you are not coming for snow, the weeks either side of midsummer give you the best combination of weather, daylight and availability. The trade-off is that the highest alpine trails clear late — snow lies in the mountains long after it has gone from the towns — so a June trip should be built around lowland driving, the coast and the farmland rather than around a summit.

Late April and most of May are the weakest weeks. The snow has gone or is going, which ends the ski season and closes nothing pretty in its place; the alpine trails in Daisetsuzan are still under melt and will not open properly until July; and the lavender that fills the summer photographs is two months away. Several mountain roads are shut for the changeover.

Early February is spectacular and also the single most booked week of the year around Sapporo because of the snow festival — expect hotel prices to double and to be staying well outside the city if you decide late. Mid-August brings the domestic holiday and a run on rental cars island-wide, which is the constraint that actually bites here rather than hotel availability.

Rent a car unless your entire trip is Sapporo, Otaru and Hakodate. The rail network here was built for freight and settlement rather than sightseeing: it links the cities competently and reaches almost none of the national parks, and the lines that do run near them are hourly at best. Buses to the parks exist, run seasonally, and stop entirely in winter in several places.

Two warnings that matter more here than anywhere else in Japan. Winter driving is real winter driving — studded tyres are standard on hire cars from November, mountain passes close, and a whiteout on a straight road is more dangerous than the mountains. And the distances make people underestimate fuel; on the eastern routes, fill up when you see a station rather than when you need one.

Hokkaido skips the rainy season that soaks Honshu in June, so early summer is dry and clear with highs around 22–25°C. That is the window for Daisetsuzan and the Shiretoko trails, which are broadly snow-free from July to September, and the Furano lavender peaks in mid-July. Winter is long: January highs stay below freezing across most of the island, the snow is dry and deep, ski season runs December to March, and the Sapporo Snow Festival falls in early February. Late September into mid-October brings Japan's first autumn colour. Skip mid-May if you want alpine trails — the melt is still under way.

Sapporo's miso ramen was built for the cold, and the Susukino shops that serve it stay open very late. Hakodate's morning market sells squid you fish out of the tank yourself, and the uni and hairy crab from the northern coasts are best from summer into autumn. Furano and Tokachi supply the dairy, which is why soft-serve is worth eating here even in January. Jingisukan, lamb grilled over a domed skillet, is a Sapporo institution, and soup curry is a local invention from the 1970s that has barely travelled off the island.

A first visit should be Sapporo plus the southern loop, in summer, and should not be ambitious. The point of a first trip here is to register how different the island is from the rest of the country — the grid streets, the farm buildings, the empty road between towns — and that lands better over four unhurried days than over seven frantic ones.

A second visit should go east and should go in winter. The drift ice off Abashiri, the cranes wintering around Kushiro, and Shiretoko under snow are the things nowhere else in Japan has, and they are all at their best in exactly the season a first-time visitor is steered away from. Fly into the regional airport nearest the thing you came for rather than driving out from Sapporo, which is the mistake almost every returning visitor makes once.