October 2025 – At home and abroad

An iconic image of Japan’s fall colors, as seen on the seatback screen on our flight to Hokkaido

After spending 10 days hop-skipping- and jumping across the Pacific, followed by two weeks in wild Papua New Guinea, who in their right mind would then tack on a week and a half in Japan?

That would be moi. I had several reasons.

I scored awesome seats for us (Business Class on Singapore) to LAX from Tokyo using points.

2) My love for Japan is bottomless; I will embrace any chance to spend time there.

3) Steve and I had never visited Hokkaido, the large island in the north of Japan. Maybe a detour there in early October would give us what we’d never experienced before: exposure to Japan’s magnificent fall foliage.

As readers of this blog may recall, we traveled in Japan last year for the first time in ages. I had hoped to experience the celebrated autumn colors then. But we were mostly in the south (Kobe, Shikoku, Hiroshima, Kyoto and Osaka), and we saw only subtle hints of the vivid palette that would soon cover the landscape. Hokkaido, on the other hand, is the northernmost of Japan’s four main islands. I studied websites devoted to predicting when and where the leaves in Hokkaido would turn, and I planned a post-Papuan itinerary accordingly.

We didn’t see much of anything when our flight landed at Hokkaido’s main airport late Thursday afternoon (October 2). We’d reserved a car, and by the time we got off the shuttle bus at Budget’s office, filled out the paperwork, and checked out our wheels (a Toyota Yaris), the sun was sinking fast. The 90 minutes that followed began well; Google maps (in English!) worked using AirPlay. But when we turned off the tollway onto the road leading into the mountains, things got harrowing. With the light almost gone, a deer leapt out of the brush and crossed the road a few car lengths in front of us. Not long afterward the sky was black; we glimpsed another deer lurking by the roadside.

Only our headlights illuminated the switchbacks, and the worst moment came when our windshield began to fog up and I couldn’t figure out how to defrost it. (Have I mentioned the road had no shoulder and almost no pull-outs?) We finally arrived, unscathed, at our hotel around 6:45 pm but to me it felt like it was close to midnight.

The next morning I opened the curtains to see…

…only the faintest hints of yellow and russet dusting the hillside across the road.

The weather was so glorious, however, nothing could dampen my mood. Steve and I spent the day poking around Jozenkai Onsen — a long-established mecca for hot springs lovers. In the center of the tiny town, you could…

…cook an egg in that enclosed area on the right. (It’s a Japanese thing.)

A sign warned that brazen crows might snatch your eggs if you weren’t careful.

We prowled through a cave filled with statues of Buddhist deities…

…decided NOT to hike into the bear-infested woods.

…admired the (mostly green) trees surrounding the town’s picturesque bridge.

We also stopped in at the local tourist office to ask if we might find more fall colors anywhere nearby. A helpful staffer suggested we visit the Sapporo Kokusai ski resort about 30 minutes away. She said we might find a more classical autumnal scene at the top of the ropeway there.

When we arrived at the resort Saturday morning, people were bustling about, setting up for the day’s “autumn foliage festival.” Burly chefs were slapping big chunks of pork on an outdoor grill; food stalls were opening. We hopped on one of the gondolas and did see more mustard and vermilion hues as we neared the top.

We couldn’t linger at the festival because we had to drive several hours to reach Daisetsuzan, the largest national park in all Japan. It’s smack in the middle of Hokkaido, encompassing a chain of mountains, of which Mt. Asahidake is the tallest. I’d wanted to spend two nights at a lodge at the base of the mountain because I’d read that this is the part of Japan where the trees usually change color first.

Once again, we didn’t reach our lodgings until late afternoon. We took Japanese baths in the lodge’s in-house spas (supplied with hot water from the local springs.) Like the other guests, Steve and I wore our lodge-issued pajamas and slippers to the restaurant, where a multi-course French mea was included with our room cost. The next morning, we walked to the nearby “ropeway” up the mountain, and I realized most of the trees had already turned color and lost their leaves.

It was impossible to feel too disappointed, given the marvelous views from the loop trail at the top.

Fog swirled in and out, but at times the stark splendor of Mt. Ashahidake was fully revealed.

It hasn’t erupted in a long time, but the many fumaroles testify to the fact that it’s still an active volcano.

That afternoon we took more baths; gorged on a Japanese teppanyaki meal in the restaurant. On our drive the next day to Sapporo, last stop on our Hokkaido tour, I decided it was next to impossible to plan a visit to Japan specifically to see the leaves. If you lived in Japan you could check online sources and dash out to one site or another when the time was right. Or maybe you could enjoy what you saw from your front door. But when you’re booking plane tickets to fly in from more than 5000 miles away, who could predict the complex phenomenon? (Remind me never to try to catch the peak cherry-blossom bloom.)

Our drive to Sapporo was pretty colorful, winding as it did through a region known for flower crops.

We stopped along with a large knot of Japanese tourists paying homage to this famous oak tree. Apparently it was used on the package of Seven Stars cigarettes back in the late 1970s.

We turned in the rental car…

Then we had three nights and two full days in Sapporo, Japan’s 5th largest city. We filled them with pleasant activities.

We ate “seasonal dishes” at a beautiful restaurant in a downtown high rise.

Local folks also were gobbling up seasonal street food.

Corn, roasted on the cob and packaged in plastic, was all over the place.

Here it’s a flavoring for soft-serve ice cream.

In a couple of local museums, we learned about Hokkaido’s history. This reinforced our impression that Hokkaido is Japan’s Alaska. Its native population (the Ainu) lived in ways Alaska’s natives would have understood. When the monied powers from Honshu took over the island in the mid-1800s and made it part of Japan, they oppressed the Ainu people in ways that depressingly resembled what was going on in Alaska around the same time. Like Alaska, Hokkaido has big landscapes, big animals. (All those bears! All those deer.) People tend to feel more free to experiment.

Seibei Nakagawa was such a young man. One hundred and sixty years ago, when he was 17, he stowed away on a boat heading for Europe (an action punishable by death at the time.). In Germany he learned how to brew beer and became the first certified Japanese beer brewer. When he returned to Japan, he became the first brewmaster at the first-ever Japanese brewery, named after the city where it was founded in 1876.

For our last dinner in Japan, Steve and I headed to the beer garden on the grounds of that original Sapporo Beer facility. We’d made an online reservation for a meal that would allow us to quaff an unlimited amount of beer and consume an unlimited quantity of one of Hokkaido’s most famous dishes — jingisukan. That word is a Japanese rendition of “Genghis Khan.” The dish requires diners to grill their own meat and vegetables on a cast-iron dome-shaped skillet supposedly inspired by the shape of Genghis Khan’s helmet.

The Sapporo Brewery’s “Biergarten” has several restaurants. We chose the largest one, which was rocking with laughter and conversation when we arrived a little after 6. At our table we found a skillet, a cube of lard, and two plates, one holding thinly sliced mutton. The other was heaped with sliced onions, cabbage, and bean sprouts.

We selected our first steins of beer from among the five types on draft. Back at our table, we melted the cube of fat and grilled the lamb (delicious, dipped in a salty sauce). We cooked and ate the veggies, then felt bewildered. Where were the other meats and vegetables supposedly included in our meal?

Finally, we figured out that we had to select them using a special digital tablet on our table. Once ordered, one of the many robots circulating throughout the room would bring the additional dishes to us.

Here’s Steve transferring some of what we ordered from the robot waiter to our table (#E12). The robot carried our table number next to the dishes intended for us.

Fueled by the beer, entertained by the cooking and the robots, sated by all the grilled lamb and beef and pork and chicken and some veggies, we walked out into the windy night. Again it was too dark to see much color anywhere. Again, that was okay.

A poster for the event, showing a view of the fairgrounds from overhead at night.

On Wednesday, Steve and I went to the fair. Technically, it’s called Expo 2025 Osaka, but it’s a world’s fair. Some 158 countries are participating, and more than 22 million people have attended since it opened April 13. The only reason I knew it was happening is because we visited Osaka last fall and saw posters promoting it. When it turned out we were going to be in Osaka again this October, the Expo called to me.

Throughout my life I’d read about the great early international expositions of the late 19th Century: Paris, London, Chicago. We have at least one friend who attended the 1964-65 New York City world’s fair and still recalls its wonders with awe. But neither Steve nor I ever had the chance to go to one. So in July, I bought tickets online.

Now I know I should have done that months earlier. For one thing, the ticket-buying process was almost unimaginably complicated. The official Expo registration manual was more than 30 pages long.

After hours of study this past summer, I secured one-day admission for us. (This cost about $41 per person.) But I could only get tickets that let us enter the gates at 10 a.m.; the earlier slots were all gone. Worse: I had missed the deadline for making reservations to enter the pavilions at the heart of the fair-going experience.

There were one or two lotteries in which one might snag such reservations closer to the day we would be attending, but it was all so arcane and confusing (and we were traveling by then), I never succeeded. So we set off Wednesday morning with limited expectations:

I wanted to walk the “Grand Ring.” To accommodate the expo, the Japanese built an artificial island in Osaka Bay. Then, encircling the heart of the fairgrounds, they built what’s being billed as the largest wooden structure in the world — a beautiful, elevated wooden walkway. No tickets were necessary to amble along it and take in the views of the bay, the city, and most importantly, the festival pavilions.

Some pavilions didn’t require a reservation. I hoped to visit as many of those as possible until we ran out of energy.

I also had been hoping the crowds that jammed the Expo in its initial months would diminish by the time we got there. What a laugh. My heart sank when we read in an English-language Osaka newspaper that this event had proven more popular than the Expo held in Aichi, Japan in 2005. Total visitors were expected to amount to around 25 million, with daily attendance building as the end of the event approached.

We took the metro from our hotel. As we neared the Yumeshima station just before 10 a.m., I began to believe it: more than 200,000 people DID share our plans for the day.

Our car in the subway was as crowded as any I’ve experienced in Tokyo.

At the end of the line, we all poured out and onto the escalators.

The crowd was in a festive mood as we approached the exit.

This dampened a bit when we all trudged into a huge queue for the security screening.

After about 40 minutes, we finally reached the security screeners, tapped our QR codes on a reader, and walked into the entry plaza. To orient ourselves we headed for the Grand Ring.

Here’s how it looked as we approached it.

The space underneath the walkway was striking.

Up on top, we found two levels of walkway, one adjoining an embankment planted with grass and wildflowers. At certain points, you could look over it to take in Osaka Bay.

Looking down from the other side of the walkway, we saw scattered performances taking place, like this one by some Japanese traditional dancers.

It was also a great place to see some of the pavilions. This was Canada’s.

Turkmenistan’s pavilion looked particularly snazzy. Turkmenistan?

About halfway around, we were starting to feel hungry, so we descended to the fairgrounds to search for lunch. Long queues were already forming. We braced ourselves to join them when, miraculously, I spotted a second-story dining room that seemed overlooked by the mob. At the top of the stairs, a sign announced that it was fully booked. But to our relief and amazement, the hostesses said we could have a table if we promised to be out within an hour.

It was worth every one of the 8,400 yen it cost the two of us (about $57) to sit in the cool, serene room, listen to soft classical music, and eat artful, delicious food.

Those are the appetizers on the left. The main course on the right. We followed that with excellent coffee. I felt revived. That didn’t last for long.

Outside again, the crowds had grown to mind-blogging proportions. Inching through the mob under a merciless sun, it became clear every major pavilion had an endless line encircling it.

It would have been great to visit China’s. But that was impossible.

Austria’s building was designed to evoke a musical notation, but there was no getting into it.

Steve and would have loved to check out the Future of Life Pavilion. No dice.

Here’s what we found outside Portugal’s pavilion.

As a last shot, we made our way to one of the large “commons” halls containing countries too little to have their own pavilions. You didn’t need a reservation to enter Commons A. It housed Barbados, Burundi, Bolivia, Comoros, Eswatini, Ghana, Grenada, Guinea Bissau, Kenya, Kosovo, Krygystan, North Macedonia, Malawi, Mauritius, Palau, Papua New Guinea, Rwanda, Saint Kitts and Nevis, Saint Lucia, Samoa, Seychelles, the Solomon Island, Suriname, Sri Lanka, Trinidad and Tobago, Tonga, Uganda, Yemen and Vanuatu. I had particularly wanted to visit this building because in Honiara we’d met an artist named Simon who’d told us he’d be there, representing the Solomon Islands. We’d promised to visit him. But a surly guard at the door held a sign announcing that admission was restricted. “Please come again later,” it read.

He yelled at me when I took his picture.

That was it. Sweaty and discouraged, we headed for the exit.

We passed the folks with 2 pm entry tickets, waiting for their chance to get in.

I’ll say this. If you have to be crammed into a relatively small space on a hot, sunny day with a couple of hundred thousand other humans, try to do it with Japanese. They never shove or shout with exasperation. Confronted with horrible lines, they seek out the end to join in, ever stolid. Their accomplishment at creating this event was as impressive as so many other things are in this country. Neither Steve nor I regretted going. It was worth just seeing the scene.

Still, giving the choice of attending another world’s fair or another Goroka festival, I’d take the naked, painted stone-age folk any day.

At home and abroad

with Jeannette De Wyze

Month: October 2025

Leaf-peeping in Hokkaido

It was just us and 200,000 other folks