Words by Tim Patterson
Photos by Stephanie Guico (and one by Mark Hochstetler)

For two years I lived in Hokkaido, the northernmost of Japan’s four islands, a place Jack Kerouac once called a wasteland of the world. Of course, Kerouac never actually crossed the Pacific to see Hokkaido for himself, and if he had, he would have found the sort of place he loved - frontier country, split by open highways and empty rails, with brown bears in the mountains and salmon rushing up the river-mouths.

Japan’s wasted lands lie to the south, where the bullet train blasts through sterile encrustations of square apartments and glass-walled office buildings, where salary men and their Louis Vuitton wives live walled in from the world, divorced from Shinto traditions of intimacy with land. For decades engineers and politicians have planned to extend the bullet train to Hokkaido, but for now the North Sea Road is still wild at the fringe.

I want to tell you about my favorite place in Hokkaido, although now that I think about it, Teuri Island isn’t part of Hokkaido at all. It’s a smudge on the horizon off Highway 233, a rock in the Sea of Japan on the way to Vladivostok. Over a million seabirds breed on Teuri each summer, clinging to nesting-cliffs raucous with joy. “There’s fish to eat and babies to make,” the birds scream. “We’re here, we’re alive! Here and alive!”

Eat a belly-full of sweet shrimp, slices of squid, chewy hunks of octopus, wedges of grilled fish, globs of sea urchin roe, scallops boiled in their shell-juices, hot miso soup and cold Sapporo beer to wash it all down. Walk beneath the green cliffs and listen to the birds. To the North 8,000 feet of snow-streaked volcano rears triangular from the sea. Brown kelp shines smooth on gray rocks; white fishing boats roll in the blue water swells. Waves crash and the seabirds wheel: Here and alive. Here and alive.

Few Japanese have heard of Teuri, and apart from my friends, I’ve never seen another foreigner there. It’s one of my secret spots, and in this guide, I’ll lay out exactly how to get there.

If Teuri were off the coast of Massachusetts instead of Hokkaido, summer homes would line the shore and yachts would crowd the village harbor. It’s a jewel of an island, with hilly green meadows that glow with wild lilies in the summertime. But there’s no equivalent to Nantucket in the Sea of Japan, and the overworked Japanese, crowded into cities, don’t use summer as a verb. Houses on Teuri are weather-beaten and worn, rustic by virtue of isolation and hard winters. The islanders are fisherfolk, red-cheeked, rough-skinned and truly glad to meet you.

For six months of the year Teuri is practically impossible to reach, and you would have to be crazy to try. The west coast of Hokkaido gets broadsided from November to April by winter storms that rage down from Siberia and build strength over the Sea of Japan. Teuri is the first place these blizzards make landfall, and the snowdrifts don’t melt until the middle of June.  Read More...