The best souvenir from Hokkaido is the one you make yourself. Across the island, studios and cultural centers will put clay, glass, wood, wool, or an embroidery needle in your hands, from a chopstick studio in central Sapporo to a pottery studio on the shore of Lake Tofutsu.

Hokkaido's crafts grow from two currents. The first is Ainu heritage: the island's Indigenous people have long decorated clothing, tools, and ritual objects with carved and embroidered patterns, and Ainu artists at places like Lake Akan and Upopoy are still making and teaching that work today.

The second is the frontier. The island took the name Hokkaido in 1869, and its modern history was shaped by migrants and settlers from the rest of Japan, a change that also transformed life for Ainu communities.

During the Meiji period, abundant land and government support drew papermakers, silk farmers, and potters from around the country. Artists have kept coming north since, like the family of potters who moved from Kyoto to Kutchan in 1990 and now run FAF Kobo. Both currents run through the studios below.

This is a growing list, not a ranking: it starts with the places we've found so far, and we'd love tips on the ones we've missed. Where we could confirm it, each entry ends with a note on how much English to expect.

[READ THE FULL GUIDE on the website →]

Otaru is famous for glass, but its glass industry began in the 1890s making something practical. What did its early factories mainly produce?

A) Lamp chimneys and fishing floats
B) Church windows
C) Telescope lenses
D) Lighthouse lenses

Keep reading. The answer’s waiting for you at the bottom of this issue.

On a brewery lot in Asahikawa, kids climb into the mouth of a giant sake bottle. The slide is about 12 meters long, and it anchors a park that opened in September 2024 at the headquarters of Otokoyama, one of Hokkaido's best-known sake makers. Next to it, a shop sells limited-edition sake, a cafe pours lattes made with a syrup boiled down from sake, and a tap lets locals fill their own bottles with the brewery's brewing water.

We pour Otokoyama at our family's Japanese restaurants in Buffalo, New York, so we're not neutral here. It's the sake people order with sushi and sashimi, and when we started reading about the brewery, the slide was the funny detail that made us want to know why. The answer says a lot about where sake stands right now, at home and abroad.

The name is old. Otokoyama, which literally means "man's mountain," traces back to 1661 in Itami, near Osaka, where a brewer called Kinuya Yamamoto Honke made a sake that the Edo shogunate used as an official sake, known as gomen-zake. It turns up in kabuki, in puppet theater and in woodblock prints. The brewery's museum in Asahikawa displays prints by Utamaro and Kuniyoshi, including a Kuniyoshi print that, according to tradition, shows the 47 Ronin drinking Otokoyama to celebrate their revenge. The sake we serve, Kuniyoshi no Natori-zake, is named after that print.

The Itami brewery closed in the late Edo period, outcompeted by the rise of the Nada region's sake. Meanwhile, in Hokkaido, a family that had come from Niigata was brewing under the Otokoyama name. The brewery dates its own founding to 1887. The family says it felt Hokkaido sake lacked history, so the third-generation head, Yamazaki Yokichi, went looking for the original Itami house. He found a descendant who didn't know what to do with centuries of documents. The descendant handed them over, along with the seal that conveyed the brand's lineage, and the family built a museum around them. In 1968 the company took the name Otokoyama.

That's the brewery's own account. Many breweries across Japan use the Otokoyama name, because it can't be trademarked. The president, Yamazaki Goro, the fifth generation, guesses there may be about 15.

Asahikawa grew as an army town and a railway hub, and by the end of the Meiji era it had 14 sake breweries, according to the Kamikawa Subprefecture. Today it's the only city in Hokkaido with three. Otokoyama brews with groundwater fed by Daisetsuzan's snowmelt, and since 1977 it has let the public draw that water for free. About 200 people a day come, to cook rice, brew coffee, or water down shochu.

The style is light and dry. Yamazaki says Hokkaido sake leans that way because people here eat so much raw fish. He tells his brewmaster not to make "a delicious sake this year" but the same sake as every year. "We made the same sake again" is the answer that earns a perfect score.

That consistency helped it travel. In 1977 the brewery entered its junmai daiginjo in Monde Selection, and says it became the first sake to win a gold medal there. Exports to the United States began in 1984 through the Nihon Meimonshukai, a network of regional breweries formed in 1975 to raise sake's standing abroad. The brewery now ships to 20 or more countries. In a 2023 interview, Yamazaki said about half its exports go to the United States, where it's mostly poured with Japanese food, especially sushi with fatty salmon. He'd rather see it at a sushi counter than a fancy bar.

That matches what we see in our dining rooms. We list Otokoyama's tokubetsu junmai in a three-sake extra-dry flight we call The Karakuchi, next to Suijin, a junmai from Iwate, and Katana, a junmai ginjo from Shizuoka. It also sits in our "rich" section, which sounds like a contradiction until you taste it. The brewery describes it as sharp and clean with a faint acidity and a full savory finish, polished to 55 percent. It's very dry, with real umami behind it, and it's built for sushi and sashimi. Overseas the brewery sells it as "Tokubetsu Junmai Otokoyama," so that's the name to look for on a shelf in the US.

Then came 2020. Yamazaki told STV News that the pandemic made sake feel like the villain, and the brewery's production fell 70 percent from the previous year. In the worst year it made only 30 percent of normal.

Sake's trouble at home is bigger than one brewery. According to the same STV report, domestic consumption peaked at about 1.7 million kiloliters in the 1970s and is now under 400,000. Abroad, the picture runs the other way. Japan's sake exports reached 45.9 billion yen in 2025, up 5.5 percent and the second straight annual rise, to a record 81 countries and regions, with the US the biggest market by volume. In December 2024, UNESCO added Japan's traditional sake brewing to its list of intangible cultural heritage.

So Yamazaki set out to reach people who don't drink sake. The Sake Park is one answer. Others include a craft gin brewed from Hokkaido rice, a lemon sour made from only rice and lemon juice, and a sushi-specific sake developed with Hokkaido sushi chefs, who blind-tasted candidates. His father, Yokichi, told STV that making sake only the old way probably won't keep the company alive, so he tells his son to try whatever he likes. Since the renovation, Yamazaki says, noticeably more young people come. If children play at a brewery, he figures, it feels familiar when they grow up.

In Asahikawa, the Otokoyama sake-brewing museum is free to enter, with Edo-period documents, woodblock prints and brewing tools, plus a tasting corner where some pours are free and some are paid. Once a year, usually on the second Sunday of February, the brewery opens its grounds and pours freshly pressed sake. In 2023, nearly 10,000 people came in a single day, and some started lining up at 7 a.m.

In Hokkaido, Otokoyama is easy to find, down to supermarket shelves. We couldn't find a dedicated Otokoyama shop in Sapporo, I guess they don’t need one. The Hokkaido Dosanko Plaza at JR Sapporo Station has a standing tasting counter for Hokkaido drinks, so call ahead to ask whether it's pouring Otokoyama.

If you find it back home, order it with sushi. According to the brewery's own president, that's what it's for.

Otokoyama Co., Ltd.
1-33, 7-chome, Nagayama 2-jo, Asahikawa City, Hokkaido 079-8412, Japan

www.otokoyama.com

See you out there. · また木曜日に。

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