Kitami: The Eastern Hokkaido City That Once Supplied 70% of the World's Peppermint — and Now Hosts Outdoor Barbecues at -20°C
Olympic curling champions, the most yakiniku restaurants per capita in Hokkaido, an aquarium with a frozen river tank, and an anime set on its actual streets
Most Hokkaido itineraries follow the western corridor: Sapporo, Hakodate, maybe Furano or Niseko. Kitami sits in the opposite direction entirely, out in the Okhotsk region near the eastern coast, and the visitors who make it there tend to arrive with specific intentions — pilgrimage fans, serious food travelers, people who want to watch curling in the city that produced Japan's Olympic medal-winning team. What they find is a city with a personality considerably larger than its international profile suggests.
The Food Culture That Defines the City
Kitami has the highest concentration of yakiniku restaurants per capita in Hokkaido, which in a prefecture that takes its beef seriously is a meaningful distinction. The local obsession traces to the postwar period, when a city-run meat processing plant made fresh offal — horumon — affordable and abundant for the railway workers who formed the area's workforce. The tradition of charcoal grilling that developed around that abundance never left.
What distinguishes Kitami's yakiniku from every other city's version is the nama-dare — a raw dipping sauce made from local fruits and Kitami onions, unheated, aged for days according to recipes that individual restaurants guard with genuine competitive seriousness. The sauce transforms the meat in a way that is difficult to describe and easy to understand after the first bite. Locals debate whose version is best with the kind of sustained passion usually reserved for sports rivalries.
The logical endpoint of this culture is the Kitami Midwinter Barbecue Festival, held every February, in which approximately 2,000 people sit outside in temperatures that routinely reach -20°C and grill meat over charcoal. The event is not ironic. It is enthusiastically attended and has been running long enough to constitute a civic tradition.
Kitami's agricultural production reinforces the food culture from a different direction. The city is Japan's leading onion producer — the same onions that go into the nama-dare — and sits adjacent to Lake Saroma, which yields scallops of exceptional quality. At the Tokoro Michi-no-Eki market near the lake, fresh scallops can be purchased and grilled immediately on-site over charcoal grills provided for exactly this purpose. The distance between ocean and plate is measured in minutes.
The Curling Capital
Loco Solare, the women's curling team based in Kitami, won Olympic medals at the 2018 and 2022 Winter Games and in doing so turned a city that was already proud of its curling culture into something approaching a national shrine for the sport. The team trains here, the facilities are here, and the local investment in curling runs deep enough that the city's relationship with the sport feels less like civic boosterism and more like genuine identity.
The Anime Set on These Specific Streets
Hokkaido Gals Are Super Adorable! (Dosanko Gyaru wa Namaramenkoi) is a romantic comedy manga and anime set explicitly in Kitami, using real locations throughout — the Coach & Four bookstore, local yakiniku restaurants, Higashimokoto Shibazakura Park — with enough specificity that a location pilgrimage maps directly onto an ordinary day in the city. For fans of the series, walking Kitami is walking the show's actual geography.
Golden Kamuy, the historical adventure series set in the chaotic aftermath of the Russo-Japanese War, covers the Kitami and Abashiri regions extensively. The harsh eastern Hokkaido landscape, the Okhotsk coast, and the area's particular history of frontier survival all feature in ways that make the region feel familiar to anyone who has followed the series closely.
The Natural Attractions
Northern Daichi Aquarium — known locally as Yama-no-Suizokukan, the Mountain Aquarium — contains what is described as the world's first freezing river tank: a display in which local fish swim beneath a sheet of natural ice that forms and maintains itself through the winter. It is a genuinely unusual thing to observe, and the aquarium's overall character reflects the ecosystem of the Okhotsk region with more specificity than standard aquarium formats typically achieve.
Kitami Fox Farm (Kitsune Mura) allows close observation of Ezo red foxes — the Hokkaido subspecies of the red fox, stockier and more densely furred than their mainland counterparts — in a sanctuary setting. For visitors whose image of Hokkaido wildlife comes primarily from nature photography, seeing these animals at range rather than through a telephoto lens is a different experience entirely.
The Peppermint History
In the 1930s, Kitami was responsible for approximately 70% of global peppermint production — a statistic that sounds implausible until you understand that the Okhotsk basin's climate and soil proved uniquely suited to peppermint cultivation, and that the industry scaled with the agricultural efficiency the region was developing for other crops simultaneously. The dominance was genuine, if temporary.
The industry declined as synthetic menthol production made field-grown peppermint economically unviable, but the history is preserved at the Kitami Peppermint Museum (Hakuka Kinenkan), which documents the era with the kind of local specificity that regional museums do best. The building itself is worth visiting independently of the subject matter.
A Local Phenomenon Worth Noting
Kitami's winters are severe enough — temperatures dropping well below -20°C — that residential insulation and heating systems are engineered accordingly. The practical result is that interior temperatures remain warm enough, during blizzards, for residents to be comfortable in light clothing indoors. The local habit of eating ice cream inside while a storm operates outside the window is documented in Hokkaido Gals and confirmed by anyone who has spent a winter here. It is less a quirk than a logical outcome of excellent building standards.
Two Things Worth Clarifying
"It's a frozen tundra year-round." Kitami sits in a basin geography that produces significant temperature extremes in both directions. Winters reach -20°C and below. Summers regularly exceed 30°C. The city requires a different wardrobe for July than for February, which is not what most visitors expect from eastern Hokkaido.
"It's just a stopover for the Abashiri drift ice." The drift ice on the Okhotsk coast is spectacular and worth seeing. Kitami is also the largest commercial hub in the region, a serious culinary destination, and a city with enough distinctive character to justify its own itinerary rather than a single night between transit connections.
