Obihiro

Obihiro is not a place most people put on a Hokkaidō list, and I think that’s exactly why we loved it. Lia and I came for a single dish — I’ll get to it — and stayed because the town turned out to be one of the most quietly contented places we visited in all of Japan. It sits in the middle of the Tokachi plain, a vast flat sweep of farmland in the east of the island, and everything about it feels solid, well-fed, and unhurried. The streets are wide, the sky is enormous, and the people we met had the easy warmth of a farming town that has never had to perform for tourists. After weeks of famous sights, it was a relief to just be somewhere ordinary and good.

Butadon and the Smell of Grilled Pork

The dish is butadon, and Obihiro invented it. Slices of pork grilled over charcoal until the edges caramelize, brushed with a sweet-savory soy glaze, and laid over a bowl of hot rice — that’s the whole thing, and it’s perfect. We went to one of the old specialist shops near the station, a narrow place thick with smoke and the smell of glaze hitting hot coals, and the cook flipped pork over the grill with the unbothered speed of a man who has done it fifty thousand times. When the bowls came, the pork was faintly charred and glossy and the sauce had soaked down into the rice, and Lia, who is not usually a big-bowl-of-meat person, went completely silent and ate the whole thing. We ordered a second to split. I have thought about that butadon at unhelpful moments ever since.

Sweets, Beans, and the Confectionery Town

The Tokachi plain grows an astonishing amount of Japan’s beans, sugar beet, and dairy, so it makes sense that Obihiro is also a serious confectionery town. The big name is Rokkatei, whose flagship building is a kind of temple to Hokkaidō sweets, and we spent a happy hour there working through butter sandwiches and marousei cookies and a soft-serve that tasted of pure cream. But the one that got us was a smaller maker, Ryugetsu, and their sponge cake soaked in syrup — homely and old-fashioned and completely delicious with coffee. Lia has a serious sweet tooth and this was, by her own account, one of her best afternoons in Japan. We bought a box of things we absolutely could not carry and carried them anyway. In Obihiro the sweetness comes straight off the surrounding fields, and you can taste it.

Garden Trails and the Big Sky

Around Obihiro the flatness of the Tokachi plain has been turned into a string of beautiful gardens, linked as a garden trail across the region. We spent a slow day at Manabe Garden, a long-established landscape garden mixing Japanese, European, and conifer sections, and it was almost empty and utterly peaceful. But honestly the best scenery in Obihiro is just the farmland itself. We drove out among the fields in the late afternoon — potato, beet, and wheat running dead flat to a distant blue rim of hills — and the sky did the thing it always does out there, filling up with towering clouds and then, near sunset, turning long bands of pink and gold over all that open land. Lia leaned out the car window taking photograph after photograph. Obihiro doesn’t have a single postcard sight, but the light on that plain is a kind of quiet event in itself.

Getting There

Obihiro sits in eastern Hokkaidō and is easy to reach by rail: a limited express train from Sapporo runs across the mountains to Obihiro Station in around two and a half to three hours, one of the more comfortable train rides on the island. Tokachi-Obihiro Airport, about a forty-minute bus ride from town, has flights from Tokyo if you want to start your Hokkaidō trip out east. The town center and its butadon shops and confectioners are walkable from the station, but the garden trail and the open farmland really need a car — rentals are easy at the station or airport. Come hungry, come in fair weather if you can, and give yourself an evening to watch the light go down over the plain. It’s the kind of place that rewards slowing down.