Journey 02 · Japan
Twelve Below, at Home
A Hokkaido winter, deliberately
Published 13 Mar 2026 · Travelled 2–12 Feb 2026
- 9 moments
- 11 days
- 698 km
- Winter
- Japan
- 105mm · f/4 · 1/125 · Portra 400 @800
- 43.5880° N, 142.4660° E
- Frame 1, roll one
- Furano line, near Biei
- 10:20
- -8°C, light snow
Two-car train, four passengers, a heater that smells faintly of toast. Through the window the snow fields ran to the hills without one footprint. I photographed the window itself, calendar and all, because the train is half of every Hokkaido winter picture even when it isn't in it.
- 105mm · f/8 · 1/250 · Portra 400 @800
- 43.5500° N, 142.4700° E
- Frame 3, roll one
- Biei hills
- 11:45
- -10°C, overcast, −10
Outside Biei the birch windbreaks stand in rows the farmers planted and the photographers inherited. In February they are ink strokes on paper that hasn't been touched. I stood in thigh-deep snow for one frame and fell over reaching for the second, which felt like a verdict.
- 105mm · f/5.6 · 1/125 · Portra 400 @800
- 43.5330° N, 142.4400° E
- Frame 6, roll one
- Patchwork Road, Biei
- 13:10
- -9°C, still, high grey
Every Hokkaido photographer has a lone tree they return to, the way other people have a shrine. Mine stands off the Patchwork Road, unfashionable, not the famous one. The cold had silenced everything except the power lines. Shutter at 1/125th, and even that felt loud.
04 · What minus twelve does to the kit
- 105mm · f/8 · 1/60 · Portra 400 @800
- 43.1980° N, 140.9950° E
- Frame 2, roll three
- Otaru canal
- 15:50
- -4°C, snow easing
She walked this canal to work in the eighties and narrated the whole length of it: which warehouse held herring, which held excuses. Snow on the old brick, a boat waiting for summer. I made the frame she pointed at, not the one I had planned. Hers was better.
- 105mm · f/2.4 · 1/60 · Portra 400 @800
- 43.0570° N, 141.3530° E
- Frame 8, roll four
- Susukino, Sapporo
- 19:25
- -6°C, steady snow
Back in Sapporo I stood on a corner in falling snow with the camera under my coat like contraband. The green streetcar came through the white with its one warm eye. I had one chance at 1/60th and the film gods were kind. My favourite frame of the winter.
one chance. that is the whole religion
Overheard · Ramen Yokocho, Sapporo · 20:10
"Cold this year." — "Colder in '96." — "Everything was colder in '96." — "We were thinner." Silence, then both laughed at the snow. I wrote it down with a hand that had stopped working.
- 105mm · f/4 · 1/500 · Portra 400 @800
- 43.2300° N, 144.3200° E
- Frames 7 and 8, roll five
- Tsurui, eastern Hokkaido
- 08:15
- -15°C, river mist, −15
East to Tsurui, where the red-crowned cranes winter in the river mist. They dance for their own reasons, not the photographers lined up like artillery. I waited for one bird to separate from the flock and gave it two frames of the four I had left on the roll.
- Kyogoku, below Mt Yotei
- 16:05
- -11°C, clearing, hard cold
- Last frame
Driving back through Kyogoku the cloud lifted off Mount Yotei for perhaps ten minutes, the whole volcano white on white with the snow field running to its feet. I stood on the road bank with the last frame of the last roll. There is no better way to finish a winter than with nothing left.
- 105mm · f/11 · 1/250 · Portra 400 @800
- 42.8600° N, 140.8800° E
- Frame 10, roll six
The route
9 stops
Journey completed
Eleven days, nine stories
- Frames exposed
- 68
- Batteries kept in armpit
- 2
- Shutter failures from cold
- 1
- Bowls of ramen, medicinal
- 9
- Favourite moment
- The tram appearing out of the snow exactly when the frame needed it
- Best food
- Shio ramen in Otaru with my mother, who said the broth was better in 1988
