About Inside Hokkaido North
This site covers three places: Asahikawa, Biei and Furano. Nothing else. It's written by someone who has actually lived in Biei and Furano, and who now lives in Asahikawa.
Why only three towns?
There is no shortage of websites that will tell you about all of Japan, or all of Hokkaido. They're useful for deciding where to go. They're much less useful once you've decided, because nobody writing them has stood at the Blue Pond car park in February wondering whether the road back will still be passable.
We'd rather cover a small area properly than a large one thinly. That means we can tell you things like which side of Furano's ski resort your hotel is on and why that matters, or that a restaurant's toilet isn't wheelchair accessible, or that the illumination season dates changed this year — the details that only matter once you're actually planning to come.
Who writes it
The site is run from Asahikawa. Before that, we lived in both Biei and Furano — so all three places we write about are places we've lived in, not places we visited for a weekend.
That's the entire basis of this site. We're not a large publisher and we're not pretending to be comprehensive about Japan. We know this one valley well.
How we decide what to publish
- We check things before we write them. Opening times, fares, seasonal dates and prices are sourced from official operators, town offices or tourism associations wherever possible, and we link to those sources.
- We say when we're not sure. If we ate somewhere two years ago and the price may have moved, we say so rather than presenting an old figure as current. If a season's dates are provisional, we say that too.
- We don't invent places. If we can't confirm a business exists and operates as described, it doesn't go on the site.
- We use our own photos where we have them, and clearly credited stock photography where we don't. We don't take images from review sites or from businesses' own pages without permission.
- We'll tell you not to come. If a plan doesn't work — a day trip that's really four hours of driving, a restaurant that isn't worth the detour for your trip — we'd rather say so.
Safety
Every winter, people are rescued from the backcountry around Furano, and the majority of them are foreign visitors. We take that seriously. We will point you toward licensed guides and we will not promote unguided off-piste access, however much traffic it might earn.
How the site makes money
We use affiliate links: if you book a hotel, car or activity through a link here, we may earn a commission at no additional cost to you. Where a booking link is an affiliate link, it's marked as such on the page.
Commission never determines what we recommend. If the cheaper option is the better one for your trip, that's what we'll say. See ourprivacy policy for what this means for your data.
Corrections
Things change here — bus timetables, illumination dates, parking fees, opening hours. If you find something on this site that's out of date or wrong, we genuinely want to know, and we'll fix it.
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