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.

AT A GLANCE From: Hamilton, Ontario · In Hokkaido since: 1999 · Home base: Ishikari, near Sapporo · Day job: high school and junior high teacher (20+ years), plus an evening English school he runs with his wife · Podcast: Cycling Hokkaido, weekly, 150+ episodes · Family: wife Haruka (from Noboribetsu), two sons at university in Tokyo

You grew up in Hamilton, Ontario. What's the version of you that left Canada — and how would that guy react if he could see your life in Hokkaido now?

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.

What's the moment you remember thinking, "I'm not leaving"?

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.

Continued below — his take on the new Hokkaido, what tourists get wrong, and the most overrated (and underrated) places on the island

In what year did Sapporo host the first Winter Olympics ever held in Asia?

A) 1964 B) 1972 C) 1980 D) 1998

Keep reading — the answer's waiting for you at the bottom of this issue.

This past Sunday, on the banks of the Toyohira River near Minami 7-jō Bridge, Sapporo held its 45th annual Ashiri Chep Nomi. This isn't just a recap of what happened that afternoon. It's an attempt to explain why it happens at all, and why a ceremony held on an ordinary stretch of riverbed in the middle of a modern city carries as much weight as it does.

Ashiri Chep Nomi means, roughly, "the ceremony to welcome the new salmon." For the Ainu, salmon weren't simply a food source. They were central enough to daily life that autumn brought a standing relationship with the kamuy, the spirits understood to inhabit the natural world: keep the rivers clean, and the salmon would return from the sea. When they did, the first fish caught wasn't just eaten. It was offered back, formally, in thanks.

That's what this ceremony still does. Public schedules for the event describe a day built around exactly that structure, Ainu food offered for tasting, an opening, a Kamuinomi prayer directed at the kamuy, traditional dance, and a close. The shape of the day has almost certainly stayed close to what it's always been, because the point of a ceremony like this isn't to reinvent itself each year. It's to keep doing the same thing, reliably, for as long as the river keeps running.

The ceremony didn't survive by default. Meiji-era fishing regulations effectively banned Ainu salmon fishing on rivers like the Toyohira, and Ashiri Chep Nomi went dormant along with it, for close to a century. It wasn't until 1982 that it was revived, as part of a broader push by Ainu communities to keep traditions alive that Japan's own policies had spent decades pushing toward extinction. This year's ceremony being the 45th tells you exactly how long that revival has now held, longer than the gap it was trying to close.

That history changes what the ceremony actually is, though. It's not simply an old tradition that happened to survive. It's a tradition that someone had to actively decide to bring back, and then a community had to keep showing up for, year after year, to make sure it didn't lapse a second time.

Most of Sapporo goes about a completely ordinary Sunday while this happens a short walk from downtown. That's not a criticism. It's just true, and it's part of what makes the ceremony feel different from something like Sapporo Autumn Fest, which the entire city organizes itself around. Ashiri Chep Nomi isn’t trying to be Sapporo's main event. It ‘ only asking for one afternoon, one stretch of riverbank, and a room of people who understand exactly why they're there.

If you missed it this year, it'll be back next September, same river, same reason. The salmon come home. Someone has to be there to say thank you.

That's the issue. See you Thursday for the weekend guide.

See you out there. · また木曜日に。

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Sapporo was actually supposed to host the Winter Olympics decades earlier, it won the rights to the 1940 Games, but Japan withdrew as war with China escalated, and the Games were cancelled outright. It took another 32 years before Sapporo finally got its turn. The 1972 Games left a real mark on the city too: Sapporo's subway system and its underground shopping network, the same tunnels that keep half of downtown walkable through winter, were both built to get the city ready for the Olympics.