Shintoku, Hokkaido

Ninety percent forest, the data says — and you feel it the moment the train slows into Shintoku on the Sekishō Line. The platform sits at the edge of something large and unhurried: the Daisetsuzan massif to the north, the Tokachi river basin spreading south, and between them a small town that has been buckwheat country since the Meiji clearing of these hills.

The soba here is not incidental. It anchors two separate festivals — the Shintoku Soba no Sato Matsuri and the Shintoku Shin-Soba Matsuri — as if the harvest needs celebrating twice to be believed. Alongside it, the town produces cheese and venison, shiitake mushrooms pulled from the surrounding forest, ceramics and woodwork shaped from materials that grow within sight of the kiln. The old Karikachi Line, now a museum at a former station, holds a preserved steam locomotive and a sleeping car on tracks that once crossed the Karikachi Pass — a reminder that Shintoku was once a transit point before it became a destination.

To the north, Tomuraushi-san rises into the Daisetsuzan National Park, and at its base, Tomuraushi Onsen serves as a staging point for those heading into the range. Sahoro Resort operates a safari park where Ezo brown bears roam unfenced — the only facility of its kind in Japan for multi-bear keeping. In late summer, the Shintoku Kūsō no Mori Film Festival, running since 1996, screens documentary films on war and minority experience in a mountain town that seems, in that context, quietly deliberate about what it chooses to remember.