WAKKANAI STATION (HOKKAIDO)

Frozen life in a northern town

Photos by Yomiuri Shimbun Photographer Masaaki Nakajima

By Akihisa Aoyama

Yomiuri Shimbun Staff Writer

The night express looked more like giant snowball than a train on its arrival at 6 a.m. at JR Wakkanai Station in Hokkaido. The rear of the train that had departed from Sapporo was white with snow.

Snow drifted across the orange-lit station, while passengers hurried to the exit without speaking as the temperature dropped to minus 10 C.

The railway line ends at the tip of the platform of the northernmost railway station in the country. Wakkanai is 1,600 kilometers from JR Tokyo Station and more than 3,000 kilometers from JR Kagoshima Station in Kyushu.

The Soya Strait lies just beyond the station, and beyond the strait is Sakhalin, the southern part of which was Japanese for 40 years until the end of World War II.

"Wakkanai Station may look like a desolate terminus, but it used to be a station for a fresh start," said former primary school teacher and local history enthusiast Yukio Ohashi, 69.

From 1923 until the end of the war, a steamboat ran a ferry service between Wakkanai and Korsakov on Sakhalin. The station used to be crowded with fishermen heading north to catch herring or people looking to start new lives or seek their fortunes in a new land.

They would come to Wakkanai from Tokyo after changing trains several times. Having taken the steamer, they would then take another train to Yuzhno-Sakhalinsk, the capital of the island.

Mitsuko Nakamura, 81, worked at a cafeteria on the ferry pier: "Yes, we were terribly busy. Packed lunches such as small packet of rice or soba sold like mad."

"But in the waiting room, the atmosphere was quiet, not bustling. People were still, as if they were under some kind of burden," she said.

About 70,000 Japanese left Sakhalin via Wakkanai in the summer of 1945, leaving in droves on trains to Asahikawa or Sapporo, some even traveling in freight wagons.

The ferry service stopped when Sakhalin became Soviet territory, and after restrictions were imposed on fishing rights under the 200 nautical mile (exclusive economic zone) framework in 1977, the fisheries that had supported the town ran out of steam, as did the freight trains that carried the catch out of the town.