Chitose

Chitose is where nearly every trip to Hokkaidō begins, because New Chitose Airport sits at its edge and everyone lands there and hurries off to Sapporo or the ski slopes. Lia and I had done the same thing on an earlier visit, treating it as a corridor rather than a place. This time we stayed a night, partly to break the journey and partly out of curiosity, and the town quietly repaid us — a clear river full of salmon, a famously good airport that’s a destination in itself, and the great blue caldera lake waiting just up the road. It turns out the gateway has a life of its own.

The Chitose River and the Salmon

The Chitose River runs straight through town, spring-fed and startlingly clear, and in autumn it fills with salmon fighting their way upstream to spawn. There’s an aquarium built right against the riverbed — the Chitose Salmon Aquarium — with underwater windows that look straight into the current, so you watch wild fish battling the flow inches from the glass while the real river slides past outside. We went in the late afternoon and stood at the windows a long time, mesmerized by the muscle and persistence of it, salmon holding against the current then surging forward. Afterward we walked the riverside path in the low light, and Lia spotted them from above, dark shapes wavering in the shallows, and we counted them like children until the cold sent us home.

The Airport Nobody Wants to Leave

I’ll admit it: we spent part of a morning inside the airport on purpose. New Chitose is famous among Japanese travelers as almost a theme park in its own right — a whole floor of ramen shops gathering Hokkaidō’s best, a chocolate factory with a working production line behind glass, an onsen where you can bathe before a flight, even a small cinema. We ate soup curry and then a chocolate soft-serve that Lia declared the best of the entire trip, watching planes taxi through the wide windows. It sounds absurd to recommend an airport as a thing to see, but Chitose has made its transit hub into something joyful, and on a rainy morning we were perfectly happy to be there.

Toward Lake Shikotsu

The real prize is just beyond town. Lake Shikotsu, a deep caldera lake ringed by volcanoes, lies a short drive up into the hills, and its water is among the clearest in Japan. We drove up in the afternoon, and even from the shore road the color stopped us — a blue so pure it looked filtered, the volcanic cones of Eniwa and Tarumae standing over it. We walked the lakeshore near the visitor center, dipped our hands into water cold and glass-clear, and watched the light shift on the surface. Chitose makes the perfect base for this: sleep by the airport, wake early, and be standing at the edge of one of the country’s most beautiful lakes before the tour buses arrive.

Getting There

Chitose could hardly be easier to reach: New Chitose Airport is Hokkaidō’s main gateway, with flights from across Japan and beyond, and the town center is a few minutes away by local train or bus. Rapid trains run to central Sapporo in around forty minutes, so many people use Chitose simply as an entry point. But it’s worth a stop of its own — the Salmon Aquarium and riverside are a short walk from Chitose station, and Lake Shikotsu is about a forty-minute drive or a seasonal bus ride up into the hills. Come in autumn for the salmon run, hire a car for the lake if you can, and give the airport an unhurried hour before you fly out; it’s more fun than any airport has a right to be.