insights from frontier Japan

Setsu (Snow) Niseko, a large-scale condominium complex scheduled to pre-open this summer in the Hirafu district of the town of Kutchan in the Niseko region, has won the highest award in the condominium interior design category at the 16th PropertyGuru Asia Property Awards, the largest real-estate awards event in the Asia-Pacific region. This is the first time a property in the Niseko region has won the top award in its category, and it is expected to further increase the attention Niseko will receive from the real estate industry overseas.

The Niseko International Clinic in the Hirafu district of the town of Kutchan in the Niseko area of central Hokkaido, has established completely private examination rooms for outpatients that have a fever. The clinic also offers free PCR tests for asymptomatic people in Hokkaido. The clinic is strengthening its response system to the COVID-19 virus as the ski season begins and the number of people visiting the resort increases.

Despite the pandemic, real estate prices in the Niseko area have been soaring, and a raft of investors from busy cities, such as Sapporo and Tokyo, have visited to check out the area for themselves. But seeing a number of aged buildings in front of Kutchan Station, the visitors seemed surprised, asking: “Is this really the place expected to become a premier location after the shinkansen line is extended?”

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.

Hotel and restaurant proprietor Daiichi Kaikan (Kutchan) opened a bar called "Niseko Stand Mori Deai" in the Susukino area of Sapporo. The bar features a plentiful selection of items produced in the Shiribeshi district including food items such as cheese and ham in addition to beer, Japanese sake, gin, and fruit juice. The bar interior plays videos promoting tourism in the Shiribeshi area, advertising the allure of Shiribeshi to bar customers at a prime location within Sapporo.

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.

The Niseko international resort area has entered into its second winter under the COVID-19 pandemic. While there is no hope for a resurgence of overseas tourists after the sudden drop, energetic real estate investment is continuing unabated. "H2 Group" is a real estate company in Kutchan that has engaged in development of the first condominium facilities for the Niseko area and launched into a business merger in November 2020 with a high-end accommodation facility managing company based in Hong Kong. We spoke to Simon Robinson (60), the president of "H2 Group", about the current situation in the region and his vision for a post-pandemic Niseko.