insights from frontier Japan

During the potato harvest season in September, Taiki Harada, 41, had trouble hiring workers to help him on his 100 hectares of farmland in and around the town of Kutchan in Hokkaido. “There is no one to drive the harvesting machinery,” he lamented. “It was much easier last year.”

In December 2020, the operator of Yotei Sanitation Center, a manure treatment facility for six nearby towns and villages, purchased a 0.7-hectare lot adjacent to the center located close to National Route 5 in Kutchan, Hokkaido, for a planned renovation. The operator actually did not have a design plan and construction won’t start for another four years, but it secured the land anyway out of concerns that the price may get too high in the near future.

This summer, in a residential house surrounded by fields of potatoes and beets in a village called Makkari in Hokkaido’s Shiribeshi region, Henry Blake Turner, a 40-year-old from the U.K., started a real estate company — the only one in the village. The agency deals with properties in the village and the towns of Kyogoku and Rankoshi, as well as other towns in the vicinity of Niseko.

Developers began construction of a new hotel in the Kutchan town’s Hirafu district, a central part of Hokkaido’s Niseko resort, back in Aug. 17, when the prefecture was being hit by the fifth wave of the pandemic with daily cases topping 400. Owned by Wu Wei Yin Shi, a Macao-based catering services company making its debut in the Japanese market, the hotel will have four stories above ground and one below with a total of eight guest rooms, with plans to open by the 2022 ski season.