Since 2010, I’ve been one of the updaters for Japan guidebooks by Fodor’s Travel. I started with just the Okinawa chapter, but now I also update chapters covering Hokkaido, Kyushu, and Western Honshu.

It might seems strange to have a writer who usually lives in sunny Okinawa update the Hokkaido chapter but…

I don’t have money, but what I do have are a very particular set of skills. Skills I have acquired over a very long career.

Before I moved to Okinawa I lived for a couple of years in Hokkaido. And before I lived in Hokkaido I’d had the chance to do a fair bit of snowboarding mainly in Lake Louise (Alberta) and Red Mountain (British Columbia). International tourism is booming in Japan, and Hokkaido has become an extremely popular winter destination with great resorts and huge amounts of snow.

So last week I flew up to Sapporo to check on the accommodation, restaurant and activity options for overseas visitors. I then visited the ski areas of Kiroro, Niseko, and Rusutsu before traveling to Hakodate.

Hokkaido has a good variety in the types of resorts available from quiet local ski hills to the huge Niseko multi-mountain area that has an abundance of international visitors.

You’ll have to wait for the guidebook for all the facts, but Hokkaido’s ski / snowboard resorts continue to be some of the best in the world.

Hokkaido’s rail system is still lagging behind the rest of Japan. The train from Kutchan (near Niseko) to Hakodate took around 4 hours, but there is light at the end of the local train tunnel. By 2030, bullet trains should connect Hakodate with Kutchan in around 45 minutes before whizzing on to Otaru and Sapporo.

Back in Okinawa, the airport had a new porter service for bags 🙂