Day Trips from Sapporo, Japan

1) Yoichi/Otaru

How to get there from Sapporo

You can take the train (Airport Rapid Express) or bus (Chuo Bus) to Yoichi and/or Otaru. Google Maps and Jorudan give accurate info about times and connections.

Yoiichi--home of the Nikka Distillery Great and FREE tour of the Nikka Distillery! You need to make reservations 30 days in advance. Use this link for that (Nikka Whisky distillery tour).

The tour has a QR code that gets you English translation (or other languages) as you go. It was cool to see the rooms and equipment even on a day they were not working. We learned a lot about the whisky process and the history of the family-- an international marriage and during world wars!

The layout of the distillery is lovely in itself, with old Scottish-inspired buildings spaced apart, making a nice walk. If you have tickets for the tour, you can go back and forth between the main grounds and the shop/museum/restaurant/parking lot. After the tour, you can go inside the home of the founders. Only the main room is open inside, but it is interesting nevertheless.

The end of the tour gets you 4 alcoholic drinks to try.

If there are other items you'd like to try, the museum has a fee-per-glass tasting. We tried 4 different items. Though Nikka is best known now for whisky, they started with apple drinks-- alcoholic and otherwise, and we liked these best! The apple juice with the complimentary tasting of 3 alcohols was delicious. And we really liked the apple wine (which was one of the 3 samples). The apple wine is not easily available in the USA (Or, if it is, it's around $100. A bottle cost us about $7--plus the hassle of getting it home.)

So from the store we ended up with a bottle of apple wine, three of their ciders to try at lunch, and some barley snacks.

Just outside the back entrance parking lot of Nikka Whisky is a restaurant serving venison burgers, called Ebijin, which I also reviewed on yelp. (Ebijin, 9 Chome-60-1 Kurokawacho, Yoichi, Yoichi District, Hokkaido 046-0003. Open 11 AM - 5 PM daily.). They basically have two types of yummy venison burgers - a regular venison patty with venison meat sauce, and a sloppy-joe style shredded venison with meat sauce.

The town is otherwise quite run down and though we walked what we believe is the main drag we didn't find much else to recommend. You can instead head to Otaru for a stroll among their stores.

Otaru

On our return from Yoichi, we spent about two hours in Otaru. You could easily spend a day wandering around Otaru - as a day trip by itself, it's only 30 minutes by train from Sapporo. We wandered mostly on Sakaimachihondori Street (between Sushiyadori Street and Irifunedori Street), which had many restaurants and shops (Le Tao, the patisserie, had 3 shops alone on this street!). In particular, Otaru is known for glasswork so there are a lot of glass stores throughout the town.

2. Jozenkei Onsen

This onsen town is about an hour outside Sapporo by public transit (subway and bus). It was established in the late 1800s by a monk who was shown the hot springs by the local Ainu. Like many other onsen towns, it's mostly filled with ryokan hotels, and many foot and hand baths are found throughout town, wherever a hot spring bubbles out of the ground. At the foot bath at the entrance to town, you can also purchase a tenagui (hand towel) to dry your feet. It's only 200 yen and a fun souvenir to keep.

Otherwise we explored several spots in town, then wandered through several parks and walked along several pedestrian bridges that cross the Toyohira river that flows through Jozenkei. Some of the parks we visited included the Jozenkei Gensen Park, the Jozenkei Futami Park along the river which has walking paths into the forest leading away from town that we took to visit Futamitsuri Bridge and Kappafuchi Park, and the Yama no kaze Machi, a small complex of restaurants and shops that are fun to explore. This website, Stroll Jozenkai, gives several walking itineraries and spots to see. We looked through all the sights and created our own walking route.

When we were there in the summer, it definitely felt quiet. Pictures of onsen activities suggested that high season is autumn, for the foliage, and winter, for the skiing. There is a light show that occurs during the summer at night perhaps to encourage more tourists in the summer.

Jozenkei Onsen. Minami Ward, Sapporo, Hokkaido 061-2301.