Kikonai

There’s a specific feeling of arrival that comes from crossing under an entire strait by train, and Kikonai is where you land on the other side of it. We’d boarded the Shinkansen at Hakodate Station, ridden it briefly north, and within minutes found ourselves plunging underground into the Seikan Tunnel, the long undersea passage that connects Hokkaidō to Honshu beneath the Tsugaru Strait. Lia had her nose pressed to the window the whole time, waiting for the tunnel to end, and when the train finally surfaced into daylight again she laughed and said we were technically still underground twenty minutes ago and now we were just here, in Hokkaidō, like it had happened by accident.

The First Town on the Other Side

Kikonai holds the slightly odd distinction of being the very first town you reach in Hokkaidō once the Shinkansen comes up out of the tunnel, and there’s something fitting about how unassuming it is for that role. It isn’t dressed up as a grand gateway; it’s a quiet fishing and farming town, low buildings, boats in a small harbor, nothing performing the significance of being first. We got off just to say we had, honestly, expecting little more than a station and a view, and ended up staying most of the afternoon once we realized how much the town had going for it once you looked past the novelty of the tunnel.

Soaking With Honshu on the Horizon

The real find was a small seaside onsen on the edge of town, where you can soak outdoors and look directly back across the Tsugaru Strait toward the coast we’d just tunneled beneath. It’s a strange, satisfying kind of view — steam rising off the water in front of you, the strait stretching out beyond it, and somewhere out there, invisible under the waves, the tunnel we’d just ridden through. Lia sat in the bath much longer than usual, tracing the horizon with her eyes like she was trying to spot Honshu itself, which of course she couldn’t, but the trying seemed to be half the pleasure of it. There’s something almost ceremonial about soaking at the exact spot where two islands are joined underground, looking back at the place you came from.

Scallops, Wagyu, and a Fishing-and-Farming Menu

Dinner turned out to be one of the better unplanned meals of the whole Hokkaidō trip. A small restaurant near the harbor served Tsugaru Strait scallops so plump and sweet they barely needed seasoning, alongside a modest but excellent cut of Hakodate wagyu, and the pairing summed up the whole region in one sitting — a fishing town and a farming region sharing a menu without any pretension about it. Lia said it felt like an appetizer for the rest of Hokkaidō, a small, honest sample of everything the island does well before you’ve even properly started exploring it. We left Kikonai fuller and slower than we’d arrived, already glad we’d stopped rather than just riding straight through.

Getting There

Kikonai is the first Shinkansen stop in Hokkaidō after Hakodate, about fifteen minutes away by train through the Seikan Tunnel, making it one of the easiest detours on this whole coast. It’s an easy half-day or overnight stop for anyone riding the Shinkansen north from Honshu into Hokkaidō for the first time, and the seaside onsen is worth timing for late afternoon or evening, when the light across the strait turns soft and the crowds thin out. From Kikonai, it’s a short trip back to Hakodate or onward toward Esashi and the southwest coast.