In four and a half years in Hokkaido, Eric Johnston has never seen a bear in the wild. His wife caught one for about half a second, from the boardwalk at Shiretoko. "We were perfectly safe," he said. "And by the time I looked over, I didn't see anything."

That hasn't kept him from writing about them. Johnston, the Japan Times' Senior National Correspondent, arrived in Japan in 1988 to teach English in Kyoto, and he credits most of what followed to timing. He has covered the 1995 Kobe earthquake, the 1997 Kyoto climate conference, leaders' summits in Okinawa and Hokkaido, and Barack Obama's visit to Hiroshima. Since 2022 he has worked from Sapporo, writing about national politics and, when he can, Hokkaido stories that matter beyond the island.

We talked by video for more than an hour. He had views on bears, on the Ainu, on why puns work better than sarcasm in Sapporo, and on whether the city counts as international. He also had a request, about something that happened 70 years ago. It comes at the end.

Johnston's interest in Japan started with his father, a string bass player who spent 1950 and 1951 in the Navy at Yokosuka. Volunteering for the dance bands was a dependable way off the ship. On shore leave his father took a charcoal-powered taxi into Ginza, picked up some conversational Japanese, and bought a stack of enka records. Johnston grew up hearing them. "He said, why don't you learn Japanese? It's not too difficult to speak, but the writing is quite difficult," Johnston said. "And he was certainly correct on that."

In the mid-1980s Johnston was a business and communications major at the University of Pittsburgh, where Japanese steelmakers were putting mill workers out of jobs and students wanted to know what Japan was doing that America wasn't. The university's Japanese program, which he believes had grown on a large gift from a Japanese steelmaker, had about a half-dozen students in its first-year class. He joined partly because he needed a foreign language credit and had barely taken any French.

After graduating he took a teaching job in Kyoto through friends. In 1991, tired of teaching English, he saw a small ad in the Japan Times from an Osaka publisher that wanted someone to start an English edition of its magazine for the arcade game and karaoke industries. "To be perfectly honest with you, I had no real interest in video games," he said. "My generation was pool, pinball, and foosball." He was 27, with no journalism or business experience. He could hold a conversation in Japanese, and by the end of the interview the executive editor told him they wanted to hire him.

The publisher had been founded by men who Johnston suspected may have been radical students in the 1960s and had ended up on the edges of mainstream Japan. The job was supposed to be translation. Within weeks it was clear nobody else on staff spoke English, and Johnston was building a magazine from nothing. "It was all just make it up as you go along," he said. He hired two American friends, who are still friends more than 35 years later, and traveled to trade shows in Europe, East Asia and Brazil. Somewhere in there he noticed that the Japan he had studied in college, the Japan of Sony and Panasonic that was supposed to take over the world, was not the one he was living in. "I was dealing with characters and situations that no textbook had prepared me for," he said. "And I loved it."

Years later, someone working at a video game museum in San Francisco emailed him and the two former colleagues who made the magazine with him, asking for back issues of Japan Amusement Monthly for the museum's library. Johnston had to say he couldn't help. He had thrown his away somewhere between moves.

Even so, the job gave him strong Japanese and the confidence to work in a media environment. He joined the Mainichi Daily News in Osaka in 1994, four months before the Kobe earthquake, and moved to the Japan Times' Osaka bureau in 1997. He stayed for 25 years.

Covid made the move possible. The Japan Times' owner favors remote work where it makes sense, and when the pandemic arrived company told staff that anyone who wanted to work outside Tokyo could, with approval from personnel. He and his wife, who is Japanese, had been vacationing in Hokkaido for more than 20 years. The summers in Kansai had grown longer and more humid, and the winters felt colder in the damp way he remembered from Pittsburgh. "The Hokkaido cold is a very dry cold," he said. They asked themselves how they wanted to get older, and in 2021 they decided. "We did a lot of research and we had a very clear idea of how we wanted to live our lives in Sapporo." It went, he said, "far more smoothly than either of us had predicted."

The adjustments were small. He learned standard Japanese at Pitt, with an American accent, and the intonation in Hokkaido took some getting used to, for him and for the people he talked to. His Osaka sense of humor didn't travel well. A long-term American resident gave him a rule that he has found mostly true: "Sarcasm will always fall flat, but word puns are always appreciated." Rents are still much lower than in Tokyo, though gas, insurance and food have gone up. He likes that Sapporo is compact. Tokyo is fun, he said, but "it can be quite exhausting just getting around, especially if you're not twenty-five anymore."

He misses Kyoto and Nara: the temples, the back-street cafes, the bohemian characters who were "sometimes exasperating but always inspirational." Japanese culture on Hokkaido, he noted, mostly dates from the Meiji period, so those moments are harder to find. They pass quickly, he said. In Sapporo he talks with people who run construction businesses in Niseko, with environmental activists, with researchers who study Ainu culture.

No single moment made him stop feeling like the new guy, though. People started mentioning a Sapporo neighborhood or something that had happened a few years back, and he knew what they meant. "That maybe was the moment you realize, right, I'm no longer a tourist. I'm actually living here."

The politics look different from up here too. Prime Minister Sanae Takaichi is from Nara, in the Kansai region where Johnston lived for decades. "The current Japanese government definitely has a Kansai accent and a Kansai attitude," he said, "and this is of great puzzlement to people here in Hokkaido."

Johnston has written a number of articles on urban bears, and he sees several problems arriving together. A shrinking population leaves farmland fallow and farmhouses empty, so nothing keeps bears out. A changing climate pushes them down from the mountains to look for food. People have built closer to where bears live. And the number of hunters is falling as the number of bears rises.

As Johnston explains it, Japan doesn't tranquilize and relocate problem bears the way the United States does. They are trapped and killed, and the question he gets most is why not move them. "Hokkaido is an island," he said, roughly the size of Austria, or Maine. "If you put the bears to sleep, where are you going to take them so that they don't wander back into human habitats?" Proposals have ranged from sanctuaries to sterilization to reintroducing the Ezo wolf, which he called "environmentally suspect and politically a nonstarter." His Japan Times colleague Alex K.T. Martin has just released a new book on Japan's lost wolves, Phantom Wolves of Japan, which Johnston thinks may take up the debate. Johnston's father, grandfather and great-grandfather hunted in western Pennsylvania, and he said he understands why Americans are startled by how hard it is to get a hunting license in Japan. There have been recent efforts to ease the process and bring in younger hunters. He thinks the Tokyo media can blow the bear problem out of proportion. "But it's a real issue."

Ainu history is the subject that comes up most in his Letter from Hokkaido column, which runs in Number 1 Shimbun, the magazine of the Foreign Correspondents' Club of Japan. Soon after he moved, he noticed that his Japanese friends and neighbors in Sapporo talked about the Ainu differently from people in Osaka. "I'm always interested in viewpoints different than my own," he said, "because how else do you learn?" At a local bar he met an American working on a PhD in Ainu studies, who introduced him to international researchers at Hokkaido University, including another American and a couple of people from Russia. Through them, he learned more about Nibutani, an Ainu community roughly an hour or two by car from Chitose Airport that he had visited many years previously, and was introduced to an Ainu musician who is a friend of a friend.

He came to see it as a story with an audience well beyond Hokkaido. The legal fight to reclaim land and salmon fishing rights, he said, is "an international indigenous peoples issue," and he has tried to say so. He has also tried to avoid the stereotypes he sees in a lot of coverage, and he credits the Hokkaido Shimbun for the depth of their coverage. "Is it perfect? No, but what newspaper is perfect?"

Asked how that squares with explaining it to readers elsewhere in Japan, for whom the issue can feel distant, he said a reporter always knows more than he can print. "Any journalist only prints or broadcasts maybe five to ten percent of what they've learned on any given assignment -or they think they know." His editors in Tokyo help. When he gets too absorbed in a subject, he said, they act as "a cool, dispassionate eye."

His view of the job is modest. "We in the media don't tell you the story about what happened. We tell you a story." The aim is "to help start the daily conversation." If someone spends 30 seconds on an article, mentions it to a friend, and that leads to a conversation, he said, "I've done my job."

Does Hokkaido feel like one place? "It does not," Johnston said. "It is definitely several sections pieced together." There is a Hokkaido identity, and in the 19th century there was briefly a breakaway republic, "sort of like there was a republic of Texas." But the west, with Sapporo, Niseko, Hakodate, Yoichi, Otaru and Ishikari, has long been more connected to the rest of Japan and more developed. The middle is farm country, and friends from the American Midwest tell him that driving through Asahikawa or Obihiro feels like Nebraska or Iowa. In the east, near Nemuro, summers are foggy, winters are clear and bitterly cold though dry, and Kunashiri, the island Russia holds, is visible from the coast. Trains are sparse. The depopulation he comes back to throughout the conversation is most obvious there.

He wants more tourism and does not want more of what comes with it, he said, and so do his friends in Kyoto, Kanazawa, Kurashiki and Okinawa. "Nobody that I know wants to see more and more and more diesel-spewing tour buses going through the Hokkaido countryside, especially through the lavender fields of, say, Biei or Furano." Nobody wants litter, or visitors feeding bears or posing for phone photos with wildlife "like it's some sort of Disney character." But the Hokkaido economy can't do without tourism, so the question is how to do it sustainably, and over the past couple of years it has become a political issue. "Something more has to be done."

He hasn't had much time to explore in four and a half years, but when he does he heads east. He likes the coast near Akkeshi, now known for its whisky, where isolated coves recall "the west coast of Ireland or parts of the rugged New England coast or even the Pacific Northwest. Go there and bring your bagpipes." You have to drive or ride a bicycle, since trains barely run. He likes Shiretoko, which he said was less crowded, the last time he went, than in the years just after its World Heritage listing. He walks around the Hokkaido University campus and has found a few coffee shops through friends. Shakotan is nice. So is Yoichi, which he said hopes to become Hokkaido's Bordeaux or Napa. "If you want to enjoy Yoichi before it becomes like that, you'd probably best get out there now."

Johnston sits on the Board of Councilors of Hokkaido International School, a volunteer advisory role. Twice a year the councilors get briefings, and his job, he said, is mostly "to listen and observe." He suggests speakers, asks questions, and passes along news that could affect the school.

Lately the news is growth. By his figures, Sapporo had about 8,800 foreign residents in 2015 and has more than 25,000 now. Hokkaido as a whole has about 78,000, up from roughly 30,000 a decade ago. Close to a majority come from Vietnam, Indonesia and China, which suggests to him that demand for international schools will shift toward East and Southeast Asian families. Hokkaido International School, which has historically served Western families, is building a new campus, and he said other Hokkaido cities have asked about opening branches. The mayor of Sapporo has said repeatedly that the city needs more international schools. A private operator's plan for one in south Sapporo fell through, Johnston said, after a right-wing social media campaign claimed it would be a cover for illegal immigration.

Does that make Sapporo an international city? He pushed back on the premise a little. "What does that really mean in this day and age?" Tokyo is the only Japanese city you could set beside New York or London, he said, with a broad foreign demographic. Sapporo is international in its interests, but its foreign population is increasingly East Asian. He put the number of Americans at roughly 900 and Russians at about 300, with few from Britain, unlike Kyoto and Kobe. "This is not a city where Hokkaido Today is probably going to be running a front-page story about the opening of a new Slovakian wine bar," he said. You might see that in Tokyo or parts of Kansai.

What he misses is the web of small foreign-run groups in Tokyo, Kyoto and Kobe: English-language poetry slams, discussion circles, and writers' groups. In Sapporo he has found few. The Hokkaido Japan-America Society, whose members are mostly Japanese and prefer to meet in Japanese, brings in speakers when it can. Recent ones include Martin Fackler, a former New York Times Tokyo bureau chief; Robert Whiting, author of You Gotta Have Wa; and Richard Dasher, director of the US-Asia Technology Management Center at Stanford, who spoke in March. A couple of smaller groups pass along practical information to older foreign residents.