Twenty-seven years ago, Martin Langford picked Hokkaido for two reasons: it had winter, and it had beer. He didn't speak Japanese, didn't know the culture, and had no particular interest in the country at all — he just wanted out of a Toronto private investigator job that had him sitting in traffic all day, every day, dealing with people who weren't especially glad to see him. Today he's a Sapporo-area teacher, father of two, and the voice behind Cycling Hokkaido, a weekly podcast now past episode 150 that turns long rides into deep dives on Jomon stone circles, Ainu place names, and the family history hiding along the Sea of Japan coast. We sat down with Martin — Marty, to most people — to talk about the accidental life, the Hokkaido that's disappeared since 1999, and the 350-year-old tree you'd never notice unless someone showed you.How a Toronto private investigator ends up in Sapporo

My origin story is a bit different from most people who end up in Japan. A lot of people come here with an actual interest in the place — they want to do karate, or they're into Pokémon, or cooking, or fashion. I knew nothing about Japan. Didn't speak the language, didn't know the culture. None of it.

After I graduated from the University of Guelph, I got a job as a private investigator around southern Ontario, mostly the Toronto area. I did that for two years. And at some point — I'm 23, 24 years old, sitting in the worst of Toronto traffic every single day, dealing with not the nicest people in the world — I just started thinking: the world's a bigger, more beautiful place than this. So I went back to night school at Brock University, did an ESL certificate, and that qualified me to teach English abroad. I sent resumes out everywhere — South America, Africa, Eastern Europe, Asia. I didn't care where, I just wanted to go somewhere different.

A company called Nova, which had an office in Toronto, was the first to offer me a job. So it was Japan, just like that. When it came time to pick a location, they asked where I wanted to go, and I genuinely didn't know enough to have an opinion. My image of Tokyo was that it's hot, and I like winter, so — very naively — I asked if there was anywhere in Japan that actually has winter. They said Sapporo, Hokkaido has winter. And I knew the name Sapporo because of the beer. So I thought: winter and beer, that'll do. Set me up.

Honestly, there wasn't one. That's the strange part. The first year was fun — this whole new thing. Second year, same. Then toward the end of year two I met my now-wife, and it just snowballed into a life. I never made a conscious decision that this was it, I live in Japan now. It just kept unfolding. Now we've got two boys, both at university in Tokyo, and some mornings I still wake up and can't quite believe it's all happened this way. It's almost surreal that it's just the two of us again after all of that.

Was there ever a pull to go back — culture shock, missing home, family pressure?

Of course you get homesick — Christmas, the NHL playoffs, birthdays, weddings, all the things you miss. But no, I never wanted to leave. Having kids is its own adventure no matter where you live, and being here, it never stopped being interesting from day one. The boys played competitive soccer forever, and that schedule alone kept us on our toes.

There were definitely stretches over the years where I would have liked to go back, at least in theory. But by then we'd have been leaving everything we'd built here for nothing on the horizon back home — I didn't have a job in Canada, or any real prospects for one. It would've been high risk with zero upside. I've been at the same high school and junior high for more than twenty years now, and my wife and I also run an English conversation school for kids in the evenings. Between the two, we make a decent living. Moving back would have meant throwing all of that away — and you can't exactly teach English in Canada.

Twenty-seven years is long enough to watch a place change underneath you, too — and Marty has watched Hokkaido's tourist scene transform almost beyond recognition. He's also got strong opinions on what visitors get wrong in their first year, and a very specific ranking of the island's most overrated and underrated spots.

The most obvious one is Niseko. The first time I went there, I stayed in a little pension at the bottom of Hirafu and there was barely anything else around. It's nothing like what it is today.

But the change I actually feel is in Sapporo itself. When I arrived, the foreign community here was small enough that people genuinely called it a small town. You'd walk down the street, see another foreigner across the road, and nod at each other — we used to call it the Gaijin Nod. I still do it, because I'm from that generation of foreigners here. But I can't tell you how often people just look at me now and don't nod back. They're either tourists, or there are simply too many of us now for it to mean anything. It's not Tokyo — up here, that nod used to mean something, because chances were you'd actually met the guy across the street at some point. That's genuinely gone now, and honestly, I'm a little sad about it. It was a comforting thing.

The beer gardens have changed too. They used to be wide open — you could sit on the grass, bring your own food and drinks, come and go as you liked. Now it's all fenced lawns, no outside food allowed, and it's expensive. And the Sapporo Snow Festival used to be a couple of ramen stands and a souvenir shop. Now it's a week-long production — projection mapping, gourmet food stalls, there was even a disco room one year. The scale of everything is completely different, and it's clearly working — the tourist numbers at these events now are massive.

I've met a lot of bike packers who show up grossly overpacked with heavy clothing because they think it's a frozen wasteland year-round. Summers here actually get quite hot now. It does cool off at night, but you don't need sweats and hoodies all summer. At the same time, the snow keeps getting pushed later and later — I've ridden my bike in mid-December, even mid-January one year — but when a real storm hits, it hits hard and fast. It's not predictably cold, it's unpredictably extreme. People plan for the wrong version of the weather.

Overrated: Ramen Alley downtown. The ramen's good, but it's not head and shoulders above anywhere else in Sapporo — it's just all in one place, which is convenient, but people line up for it like it's essential. I suspect it's an Anthony Bourdain effect. And I want to be careful how I say this next part, because I don't want it to sound like I'm bad-mouthing Otaru — it's a fun place, and there's a lot of real history and character there. But the canal area and the shopping street specifically get the same treatment as Ramen Alley. That's what I mean by overrated: the shopping and the canal crowds, not the town itself. I've seen people on message boards call it a must-see, and for that specific stretch, I don't think it is — not compared to what you'd get in Shakotan or Shiretoko or even Wakkanai. If shopping and a nice canal photo is your thing, genuinely, go enjoy it. It's just not why I'd send someone to Otaru.

Underrated: the stretch of Shakotan coast people blast straight through on their way to Cape Kamui. Everyone goes for the famous "Shakotan blue" water at that one spot, but you get that same color at Cape Ogon — the Gold Cape — and a few other places along the way that are completely empty because everyone's racing to the postcard shot. And more broadly: almost nobody who visits Hokkaido knows anything about the Ainu. There are genuinely excellent museums scattered around the island, and most tourists never hear the name.

Your wife is from Hokkaido — how has having roots here, not just choosing to live here, shaped things?

Very much so. My wife is from Noboribetsu, the hot spring town. Her sister and brother-in-law are in Muroran, and we spend every New Year's, Obon, and Golden Week with the family. We were actually at a Fighters game together the other day — it turned into a whole family outing because my mother-in-law is less mobile these days, so we took turns sitting with her while everyone else stood around the dome watching from different angles.

One of the things I feel luckiest about is having known my wife's grandmother. My boys had a great-grandmother who was originally from one of the southern Kuril Islands the Soviets seized at the very end of World War Two — she was one of the roughly 17,291 registered Japanese residents displaced when it happened. A few years ago we drove out to Nemuro so she could see the islands one more time, from a distance. Her stories are really what got me interested in Hokkaido's history in the first place — I had no idea about that whole chapter.

That, and learning about the Ainu. Once you know that history, everything shifts. More than 80 percent of the place names in Hokkaido come from Ainu words — Sapporo included. Do you know about ateji?

I do, roughly — that's when the Japanese who arrived just wrote down what a name sounded like and slapped kanji onto it, whether or not the characters actually meant anything.

Exactly that. Sapporo comes from the Ainu sat poro pet — "dry, great river," a reference to the Toyohira River. But the kanji that ended up attached to it, 札幌, literally read as something like "paper canopy." Which means absolutely nothing about the place. That's the whole tell — nobody sat down and translated the meaning of the Ainu name into kanji. They just heard a sound and bolted characters onto it that happened to fit. Once you know that, you start reading the whole map differently.

We'd been riding for years, and there were all these fascinating places I never would have come across without the bike. The real turning point was Yoichi. I'd heard about three stone circles nearby and went to check them out — sure enough, Jomon-era stone circles. Nothing on the scale of Stonehenge, but still: Hokkaido has stone circles? I had no idea. That sent me down a rabbit hole into Jomon culture, and for a while Jomon sites became my cycling destinations.

The more I researched what these places actually were and how they connected to everything else, the more it reframed how I saw the whole island. I've always loved talk radio — it got me through surveillance shifts as a PI like nothing else could, all those long-form stories. And somewhere in the middle of a Jomon site it clicked: this is interesting, and I think I've got something to say about it. Knowing what these places are changes the whole ride. It's not just a good workout with nice scenery anymore — it's a "what's actually over there" question that never runs out of answers.

The rice paddies through Gonosawa. I ride through the paddies and pop out at the Sea of Japan — fifty kilometers up the coast, fifty back, a hundred kilometers total — and I do that ride more times a year than I could count. It's got a bit of climbing, farmland, the whole rice-paddy food culture, and then the coast opens up. It changes completely with the seasons. Right now I've picked one specific rice paddy and I've been photographing it every time I pass, starting when it was under snow — by the end of the year I'm hoping it plays back like a little flip-book of the whole season. There's a service road between two tunnels along that route where I like to stop for lunch. I call that spot my Fortress of Solitude.

What does a Hokkaido cyclist's year actually look like?

Winter's my off-season, honestly. I ride as deep into December as I can and start again as early in March as possible, but I don't run a fat bike — I've got an indoor trainer at home and I just spin through the cold months. And I don't mind having an off-season. It's refreshing. I put on some weight over the winter, but that's the trade.

Are you an onsen guy?

Not really. I did stop at one in Furano recently, but that was after the ride, not for its own sake. I know people say the onsen is the whole point, but honestly I'm usually just tired by then. I'll go if it's naturally part of the weekend, but I'll never go out of my way for one.

Why cycling, over hiking or skiing?

I've snowboarded — on a bit of a hiatus right now since prices have gone up so much, and, well, the boys' university tuition comes first, but I'll be back. Hiking never really grabbed me. I've done a couple over the years — Mount Yōtei was a big one, way bigger than my hiker friend had warned me it would be — and I do Mount Moiwa now and then, which is a comfortable one. Some people love the big monster hikes. It's nice, but I just much prefer the bike.

Anything left in Hokkaido you haven't tackled?

Lots. I'd love to do real multi-day touring at some point — right now I can only get away for a night or two at a time, even in summer, since I'm never fully off work. The dream is to ride the entire coastline of Hokkaido. I think that needs a full month, which I don't have yet. Shorter-term: I want to do the northeast coast, which I've never ridden, and Lake Mashu — I've been to Lake Kussharo nearby, but not there. I'd also like to do a big loop down the south — Mori, Hakodate, Matsumae, Esashi — I've got friends along that route who could put me up along the way. And there are more Jomon and Ainu sites out there I haven't seen, plus Obihiro, which I understand is flat but I still haven't ridden.

Would you ever guide tours?

At some point, yes. I did a couple of Otaru-area tours this past summer and really enjoyed them, but doing it properly — the way the guides I've met and admired do it — would take a lot more time than I currently have. Starting from scratch, I'd only be able to take people who already had their own bikes, since I don't have a fleet.

I had an aunt and nephew from Canada out for an Otaru day this summer, and what they told me afterward stuck with me: they said they got all the visual beauty just by looking at things like Mount Yōtei on their own, but the day with me was different because they got the backstory behind what they were looking at. There's a sacred 350-year-old yew tree up on a small hill along that route — completely invisible if you don't know to look for it. It's propped up now, flowers every spring, has a Shinto rope around it. You'd ride right past it otherwise. Same with the Jomon cave carvings nearby. Nobody stops for those unless someone tells them to.

Cycling Hokkaido drops a new episode most weeks — you can find Martin on Instagram at @53.langford. His sons play soccer and study Spanish in Tokyo, he still does the Gaijin Nod even when nobody nods back, and somewhere along Route 275 there's a rice paddy quietly turning into a very slow movie.

Connect Martin on Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/cycling.hokkaido.podcast/

Visit the Cycling Hokkaido podcast here