Abashiri

I came to Abashiri specifically for the drift ice, ryuhyo, which forms in the Sea of Okhotsk off the coast of Siberia and, carried by currents and wind, drifts south until it packs against Hokkaido’s northeastern coastline sometime between late January and March. I’d read the numbers beforehand and they still didn’t prepare me: this ice travels roughly a thousand kilometers to get here, and it’s one of the southernmost points on Earth where drift ice regularly appears. I boarded the Aurora, one of the icebreaker sightseeing boats, on a gray, bitterly cold morning, and within twenty minutes the open water had given way entirely to a white field extending to the horizon, the ship shuddering and grinding as it pushed through, occasionally riding up onto a floe before its weight cracked through.

Steller’s sea eagles and white-tailed eagles perch directly on the ice in numbers, waiting for fish pushed near the surface, and I spent most of the cruise on the open deck with my hands going numb, camera up, watching these enormous birds sit almost motionless on floes drifting past the hull. Back on land, the Okhotsk Ryuhyo Museum does a decent job explaining the whole system — the currents, the Amur River’s fresh water mixing with the sea to make the ice form in the first place — but nothing in a museum display replicates the specific sound of a ship breaking pack ice, a groan and crack that I felt through the floor as much as heard.

Abashiri’s other major site is the old Abashiri Prison, in use from 1890 until 1984 as one of Japan’s most remote and feared penal institutions, now preserved as an open-air museum with original wooden cell blocks arranged in a radial pattern so a handful of guards could watch every corridor at once. Walking through the actual cells, unheated, facing north toward the same freezing water I’d just been sailing on, gave me a much clearer sense of what “remote” meant to prisoners sent here in the nineteenth century than any placard could have.

When to go: Late January through March for the drift ice cruises — early February is typically peak season for ice coverage. Summer offers a quieter, greener version of the same coastline and access to Lake Abashiri and the surrounding wetlands.