Hokkaido is different. It has different landscapes, climate, plants and animals. It also has a different history. Hokkaido never enjoyed the classical courtly culture portrayed in the Tale of Genji, and remained untouched by the titanic struggles for supremacy waged in the sixteenth century by the great warrior barons like Oda Nobunaga. During the great flourishing of urban and high culture in the Tokugawa period (1600-1868) it remained a wild frontier region between Japan, and from the mid-eighteenth century, an expanding Russian Empire. Only at the downfall of the Tokugawa shogunate, precipitated by the intrusion of the western powers in the mid-nineteenth century, did the island become unequivocally Japan, recognized internationally by a treaty in 1855.

Of course, for the native people of the island, the Ainu, it was not a frontier but their homeland, Ainu Mosir, where they hunted, fished and traded with their neighbours to north and south. Even today, the vast majority of Hokkaido place names are derived from the Ainu language, including that of the capital Sapporo. Ainu Mosir, though, was rich in natural resources that the Japanese coveted.