Last summer, I returned to Toyotomi in northern Hokkaido after decades away.
Sarobetsu is a wilderness sprawling along the Japan Sea coast near Hokkaido’s northern tip. Marshlands and wetlands stretch endlessly, and on clear days, the silhouettes of Rishiri and Rebun islands emerge on the horizon. Route 40 and the JR Soya Line cut through the interior, running north-south. The town of Toyotomi sits along these arteries, just south of Wakkanai, Japan’s northernmost city.
This place holds particular significance for me. It was the destination of my first solo journey—Toyotomi and Wakkanai. The details have faded, both in documentation and memory.
One summer day during break, I crossed the Tsugaru Strait by ferry, passed through Hakodate, Sapporo, and Asahikawa, then boarded a local train on the Soya Line. The moment I settled into a box seat for four passengers on the Asahikawa-to-Wakkanai train, three women—college students, it seemed—filled the remaining seats.
They greeted me with easy smiles. “Travel’s better with company, right?” one said, offering fruit and snacks they’d brought. I was pleased by this unexpected turn, but the tension of my first solo trip kept me quiet. I listened to their conversation instead.
After a while, one of them turned to me. “Where are you from? And where are you headed?”
I named the city in the Hokuriku region where I lived at the time, then recalled my itinerary. “I’m getting off at Toyotomi Station—four stops before Wakkanai.”
“Toyotomi? What’s there?” another murmured.
“There’s a hot spring, I think.”
“Ah,” they nodded. They were going straight to Cape Soya from Wakkanai. When I mentioned I’d visit the cape after Toyotomi, one smiled. “Maybe we’ll run into each other again.”
The train pulled into Toyotomi Station. As I stepped off, the three waved from the window. Once the train disappeared toward Wakkanai, the platform filled with the overwhelming sound of wild summer insects.
The rest of the trip exists only in fragments. Taking the bath, traveling to Cape Soya—these memories are barely outlines.
Last year, while traveling through northern Hokkaido, I stopped in Toyotomi again. I couldn’t tell if the station or town had changed in the intervening decades. At the Toyotomi hot springs day spa, I lowered myself into water naturally laced with oil. A faint petroleum scent rose. When that smell reached my nostrils, a memory fragment surfaced unexpectedly.
It was the words of the woman who’d asked, “Where are you headed?” She’d continued:
“Oh, sorry for asking so suddenly. You don’t have to answer if you don’t want to. But ‘Where are you from, where are you going?’—that’s a question only fellow travelers are allowed to ask each other, isn’t it?”
That was it. For decades, I’d believed I’d discovered this phrase myself during my travels. But I was wrong. It was something a stranger had taught me that summer, on my first solo journey. The connection between scent and memory is strange.
So Toyotomi in Sarobetsu has become the place that marks the beginning of my long travels, bound to words passed between travelers.
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