The Singaporean gaze: What locals don’t see
January and February are the coldest months in Japan. In Hokkaido, our northern fortress, almost all fields are fully covered with snow. Some weeks ago, I drove out of town with our business partners visiting from Singapore. I was genuinely happy to see their delight in the open snow fields—to people coming from a country right below the equator, everything must feel brand new. To us locals, I must confess, the snowy expanse at the foot of the mountains often just looks boring.
It’s a truly humbling experience to realize that travelers from outside often find beauty in the very things locals take for granted. Conversely, I found there was something essential the travelers couldn’t easily notice, something that wouldn’t be the first thing to catch their eye. When I asked about it, they usually looked utterly confused.
Do you know what I’m talking about? It’s the signs that animals leave, mainly footprints on the snow. Even from the car running along a snow field, I think I can instantly tell the familiar ones: deer, foxes, and rabbits. (For the record, I’m not a hunter; I’m just a highly observant, slightly bored furniture maker.)
A silent language: Decoding the tracks
Let me briefly demonstrate the peculiar language of the snow, just to show off my local knowledge.
Deer footprints are easy to tell; they are much bigger and deeper than those of other animals here. (Of course, bears are bigger, but thankfully they hibernate in winter.)
Foxes are easy, too. Do you know how they walk? They walk like models on a fashion show runway, aligning their prints in a straight line. You can easily tell the difference from the scattered prints of a dog.
Rabbits don’t walk but hop. The forefeet are aligned front-to-back, and the rear feet side-to-side. Consequently, their footprints are unique, resembling a face—the rear feet are the eyes; the forefeet are the nose and mouth. I know this sounds utterly trivial, but it is one of the small, deep pleasures of living in the wild North.
The human ego and the stripped bark
The reason I specified “mainly footprints” in the first paragraph is because there is another, more troubling sign that has become increasingly common: trees with bark stripped off.
In the harsh Hokkaido winter, with food scarce, deer eat tree bark—specifically, the soft inside layer. You see many trees exposing a white, bark-less trunk, and many of these trees are likely to wither. The number of Ezo deer has increased dramatically, now estimated to be around 700,000. Their population boom is one of the main reasons for deforestation in Hokkaido.
I readily admit this thinking is a kind of human ego, driven by the desire to manage nature for our benefit. But this overpopulation problem poses a direct threat to our wooden furniture industry, as we rely on the health of local forests. It’s the classic philosophical problem: Where does our responsibility end and our self-interest begin?
The kingdom of venison: A strategic solution to a philosophical problem
Every year, about 100,000 deer are hunted in Hokkaido, but that just barely prevents the deer population from increasing further. If there were more demand for venison (deer meat), the entire situation would improve.
It’s a classic chicken-or-egg problem: low demand means no investment in quality meat-processing infrastructure. Accordingly, the distributed venison is small in quantity and relatively expensive.
However, after that grand discussion of human ego, philosophy, and ecology, I must confess my ultimate, self-serving conclusion: I genuinely believe it is worth trying venison in Hokkaido because we are, by far, the top producer of deer meat in Japan. There are many excellent restaurants serving deer meat dishes here. You should come and eat some of the problem. (And perhaps we can find a way to use the deer leather for our furniture, too.)
Shungo Ijima
He is travelling around the world. His passion is to explain Japan to the world, from the unique viewpoint accumulated through his career: overseas posting, MBA holder, former official of the Ministry of Finance.