(Written by Yuko Fujimori)
Japanese anime and manga are now popular not only in Japan but around the world. New anime and manga are distributed quickly via the Internet, and people abroad enjoy them almost in real time, without much of a time difference from their Japanese release. Did you know that Hokkaido is often the setting of many of these works?
Hokkaido, with its magnificent nature and unique culture, attracts many visitors from all over the world. Hokkaido often appears in many movies, dramas, manga, and anime due to its unique landscape and culture, which cannot be seen in other parts of Japan.
In previous blogs in this series we have introduced movies and dramas set in Hokkaido.Hokkaido: Experience the Magic of a Film Location Tour https://hokkaido-treasure.com/column/075/
This article introduces anime and manga works that feature Hokkaido.
Hokkaido Treasure Island Travel Agency can arrange tours to visit places of your choice. Our travel consultants will support your Hokkaido tour and provide full support with a full-time driver and an English-speaking guide from your arrival at the airport to your departure from the airport. Please enjoy your own personalized Hokkaido travel experience.
Table of Contents：
1. Uma Musume: Pretty Derby
2. Golden Kamuy
3. Detective Conan series movie The Million Dollar Pentagram
4. Hokkaido Girls Are Super Adorable! (Dosanko Gyaru wa Namara Menkoi)
1. Uma Musume: Pretty Derby
What is Uma Musume?
Literally “Uma” means “horses” and “Musume” means girls in Japanese. The story of Uma Musume anthropomorphizes racehorse characters from the real world, who compete in races and grow up with each other. The characters are portrayed as unique individuals who have inherited the names and characteristics of racehorses that actually ran and were popular in Japanese horse races. The series has been developed in a variety of media, including video games, anime, manga, and music, and has gained many fans from a wide range of fields.
The area associated with Uma Musume is the Hidaka region, which faces the Pacific Ocean on the south-eastern coast of Hokkaido. It is a place with harsh natural conditions, but it is famous for producing good horses. The region has produced many horses that have become models for Uma Musume, and many of them have returned after retirement from racing to spend the rest of their lives here. Panels depicting each character in Uma Musume are displayed at various ranches in collaboration with Uma Musume. Many Uma Musume fans visit the farms to see and take photos with the panels, and Treasure Island has coordinated tours for Uma Musume fans visiting from the U.S. The tours have been very well received.
Hokkaido Treasure Island Travel has done a superb job! https://hokkaido-treasure.com/review/097/
About the Hidaka region
The Hidaka area, located on the south-eastern coast of Hokkaido, consists of plains between the Hidaka mountain range and the windy coast. Most of the area is covered by mountains, but numerous stud farms and ranches dot the plains between the mountains. A special industry in Hidaka is the breeding of thoroughbred racehorses. Horses have been bred here since the late 19th century, and today the area is home to nearly 700 horse ranches. Today, more than 90% of Japan’s thoroughbred racehorses are born and raised in the Hidaka region, also known as the “home of thoroughbreds.” Hidaka horses have also won several overseas horse races and are highly regarded outside of Japan. Currently, there are approximately 25,000 thoroughbred horses in the Hidaka area.
Some of the stud farms are open to visitors. There are also ranches where visitors can meet retired racehorses. In some ranches, visitors can touch horses and try horse riding. There is a horse museum (Urakawa Horse Museum) where you can learn about the history of horses in the Hidaka region, so you can enjoy horses in a variety of ways. Not only for Uma Musume lovers, but also for people who just love horses and are interested in Japanese horse racing.
The Hidaka Area: The Cradle of Thoroughbred Racehorses in Japan https://hokkaido-treasure.com/column/054/
2. Golden Kamuy
What is Golden Kamuy?
Golden Kamuy is an adventure comic series set in Hokkaido in the early 1900s. Kamuy is the name for the deities of the Ainu, the indigenous people of Hokkaido. A former soldier returning from the Russo-Japanese War (1904~1905) and an Ainu girl travel around Hokkaido and Sakhalin in search of hidden Ainu golden treasure. The author is a native of Hokkaido, and his grandfather actually served in the Russo-Japanese War. The book describes in detail the customs, history, and culture of the Ainu people at that time, making it possible to enjoy a tour of Hokkaido just by reading the book. The story can be enjoyed not only as a manga, but also as an anime and live-action film, making it easy to absorb yourself in the story.
The author says that the popular image of “the Ainu people” is a tragic indigenous people who have been deprived of their land and various rights, but he decided to depict cool Ainu who stand up to their fate, rather than pitiful Ainu. Enjoy the adventures of the cool Ainu people and the Japanese. An English version of the comic is also available.
Movie Trailers
The Ainu are an indigenous people of Japan, hunter-gatherers with a unique culture, who used to live mainly in Hokkaido, but also in the Tohoku area (the north-eastern region in mainland Japan), and on Sakhalin and the Kuril Islands. However, after the Meiji Restoration of 1868, Japanese people living in Honshu, on the Japan mainland, designated Hokkaido as Japanese territory and began to settle the area. The Ainu were deprived of their land and culture, and were forced to live in hardship, just like the Native Americans in the United States, the Aboriginal Australians, and the Maori in New Zealand.
In recent years, the Ainu have been formally recognized as an indigenous people of Japan and their rights are being restored. Aiming to inherit and disseminate Ainu culture, a national museum called Upopoy was opened in Shiraoi, near Chitose Airport, in 2020.
Upopoy, a symbolic space for ethnic coexistence https://ainu-upopoy.jp/en/
Places depicted in the story
The main characters in the story travel to various places in Hokkaido during their treasure hunt. There are too many places to introduce them all here, but below you’ll see some of the places that are relatively easily accessible for sightseeing tours.
Hokkaido Historical Village (Kaitakuno-mura), Sapporo
This open-air museum features relocated, restored, and reproduced buildings from the Meiji era to early Showa era (1868-1930) from various places of Hokkaido. It is located about 30 minutes by car from the center of Sapporo.
Horse-drawn carriages run through the village in summer and horse-drawn sleighs run in winter. In the movie Golden Kamuy, a powerful scene using horse-drawn sleighs on a winter night was filmed in this village. Many of the buildings in the village appeared in the original manga, and many visitors come with comic books of the original manga in hand to find out which buildings are used in which scenes, such as the soba noodle shop, hotel, and barbershop.
Abashiri, the Prison Museum
The key to the story is the tattoos on the bodies of prisoners at Abashiri Prison. They provide clues to the hiding place of the golden treasure. To collect these tattoos, the characters travel and fight all around Hokkaido. Abashiri Prison plays an important role in the middle of the story.
Abashiri is located in north-eastern Hokkaido, facing the Sea of Okhotsk. The Abashiri Prison of those days is now open to the public as the Abashiri Prison Museum, where visitors can learn about the lives of prisoners who contributed to the development of Hokkaido by constructing roads and other facilities.
Otaru
Otaru is the hometown of the main character, the Ainu girl Asirpa. The city was once dotted with Ainu villages, and from the 19th century, the herring fishing industry flourished in this area, and generated a lot of wealth. The population of Otaru once exceeded that of the capital city Sapporo. In the city, there are fishermen’s houses, called banya, which were constructed just for the herring fishing. One of them was featured in Golden Kamuy.
Yubari
Yubari, once a major coal producing town located in inland Hokkaido, prospered greatly in the first half of the 20th century. There is a coal mine museum in the city which is built on the site of a former coal mine. In the story, trolley ride-like roller coaster
Hakodate, Goryokaku fort
Hakodate appears as a very important place in the final chapter. In particular, Goryokaku Fort, the final battlefield of the Boshin Wars, the last civil war in Japan, is a must-see. Goryokaku was the first Western-style fortress in Japan, built at the end of the Edo period, in 1864. Originally built to defend against foreign attacks, it was the site of the Hakodate War, the final battle of the Boshin War (1868-1869) between the old shogunate forces and the new government forces after the Meiji Restoration in 1868.
Go up Goryokaku Tower to get a full view of the star-like shape of Goryokaku Fort from the 94-meter-high observatory, see the reconstructed Magistrate’s Office on the grounds, and think back to the battles once fought there, and also see how it is depicted in Golden Kamuy.
3. Detective Conan, the movie of 2024 : The Million Dollar Pentagram
This is the 27th film version of the popular Detective Conan Japanese anime movie series. The works depict how the boy detective Conan solves various cases. He was originally a high school boy detective but has been turned into an elementary school boy by a special drug used by a criminal organization.
Hakodate is the main setting for this movie. The key locations for solving the case are Goryokaku Fort and Mt. Hakodate.
The main focus of the film is to solve a mystery involving a sword associated with Hijikata Toshizo, a member of the Shinsen-gumi, who was a famous figure at the end of the Edo period and is often said to be the last samurai of the Boshin War.
Detective Conan: The Movie “The Million Dollar Goryokusei (Michishirube)”
Hakodate Public Hall is the setting where the kendo (Japanese fencing) match was held, and the interior of the building and the view of Hakodate’s harbor from the balcony are depicted in the film. Also, toward the last part of the story, Mt. Hakodate is the key setting. Hakodate and the former army facilities remaining on the top of Mt. Hakodate are also a key factor in the movie.
4. Hokkaido Girls Are Super Adorable! (“Dosanko Gyaru wa Namara Menkoi”)
A romantic comedy manga set in a high school in Kitami. Set in a provincial city in northern Hokkaido, it depicts the daily lives of a transfer student from Tokyo and a Hokkaido girl.
https://dosankogal-pr.com/#TopStory
The word “gyaru,” or gal, used in the Japanese title means a young girl who wears bright hair color, heavy makeup, and energetic, flamboyant fashion.
It may be similar to the English term “scene girl,” a teenage girl with bright-colored hair and vibrant, flashy fashion. A high school boy came from Tokyo and met a gal in Kitami. He was surprised by everything about her, but gradually he started to enjoy his life in Kitami with her and her friends. Through the experiences of a transfer student, you will learn about Japanese youth culture, Hokkaido’s specialties, Kitami’s food culture, dialect, and more. It has also been animated and can be enjoyed through subscription services.
Kitami is the largest city in the Okhotsk region, with a population of 120,000, and is located in the north-eastern part of Hokkaido. It stretches 110 km east to west from the Daisetsuzan National Park and the Sekihoku Pass to the Sea of Okhotsk, making it the largest city in Hokkaido and the kitchen of the Okhotsk area, where seafood and mountain products are in abundance.
Many items and things about Hokkaido are introduced in the work. In the Hokkaido dialect “namara menkoi” means “very pretty,” and “shitakke” means “see you!”. Hokkaido popular local snacks like White Black Thunder, a white chocolate bar mixed with biscuits, and guarana soda, a coca-cola taste beverage using local ingredients, are also shown in the story.
One of Kitami’s specialty foods is yakiniku (grilled meat) and Genghis Khan (lamb BBQ). Peppermint or hakka is also a specialty of Kitami. In one story, the heroine said peppermint candy is good for sore throats. Peppermint oil is also a good refreshment.
One of the activities mentioned in the work is smelt (wakasagi) fishing. Make a small hole in the ice of a lake, drop a fishing line into it, and wait until you catch smelt fish. Even beginners can enjoy it easily and, moreover, you can eat freshly caught wakasagi as tempura (deep fried in batter) on the spot. The taste of freshly fried wakasagi tempura is exceptional.
Hokkaido Treasure Island Travel Agency offers smelt fishing tours near Sapporo.
A popular dating spot near Kitami appears in the story: Higashimokoto Shiba-Zakura Park, famous for its lawn cherry blossoms in the spring, from mid-May to early June. This large park in the town of Ozora offers a breathtaking view of pink and white lawn cherry blossoms blooming all over the park. On top of the hill, there is a pretty pink-colored torii, the shrine gate of Yamatsumi Shrine. It is said if you visit the shrine you’ll get good luck.
https://shibazakura-net.translate.goog/? _x_tr_sl=en&_x_tr_tl=en&_x_tr_hl=en
Let’s experience the daily lives of Hokkaido high school students with namara menkoi Hokkaido girls.
How was your tour of manga and anime set in Hokkaido?
We hope that you have found new charms of Hokkaido that you did not know before. You can also discover new regional charms by touring around Hokkaido with a focus on the characters and events that appeared in the stories, not only by visiting tourist attractions.
In addition to manga and anime, many live-action films have been shot in Hokkaido, including the Netflix drama First Love and the Japanese film Love Letter directed by Shunji Iwai, which is also popular abroad. The Philippine film Kitakita and the Chinese film If You Are the One are also popular in each country. There are many beautifully filmed movies to choose from.
Why don’t you find a special tour of Hokkaido which is different from the usual tour ? We are sure that you will have a unique and wonderful travel experience. Hokkaido Treasure Island Travel Agency can plan and arrange an original tour to meet your needs. Please feel free to contact us!
