Showa-Shinzan

It wasn't a good night's sleep and it was partly my fault. I didn't realise that there was an additional mattress available so the bed was hard. The pillow was filled with seemed to be plastic pellets, and the location of the hostel by a traffic junction meant there was traffic noise. I think I figured out in the morning how to close one of the windows. We'll see if it works.


Breakfast was Japanese, just rice with tiny fish and some veges and pickles. Adam left for the next leg of his cycling holiday and I walked 2 km up to Showa-Shinzan. 

Showa-Shinzan (meaning the reign of the emperor that year, 1944, and new mountain) is next to Mt. Usu, its parent. It first uplifed a wheat field and then burst out a few months later. Over the a period of months it grew by lava expulsion until it reached a height of about 400 metres.  It's dormant and you can see a little smoke emerging from vents. So all the park shops and facilities are living on borrowed time, years or centuries. But I'm sure the volcano is monitored to a millimeter of its life. They have to in this country.


When it was born, it was wartime and the millitary kept it a secret, fearing it might be regarded as an ill-omen. So no studies were made of it. Fortunately the local postmaster, one 57 year old Mimatsu Masao, had worked as an assistant to a vulcanologist in his youth, made detailed measurements of its growth profile, which turned out to be valuable data later.  After the war, using his own funds, he bought up the land on which it stood to prevent mining interests from grabbing it. Fortunately he lived to see "his baby" declared a national treasure in 1957, and lived for twenty years more after that. He never charged people to view the volcano and this is still the case.

The conversations I overheard in the park showed that there were quite a few Chinese tourists in Hokkaido, probably on a day trip from Sapporo.


I took the ropeway (cable car) to the rim of Mt. Usu. From there you look over Showa-Shinzan. You can see that vegetation has already colonised its flanks. A short walk takes you to a vantage point where you can look out to the Pacific coast. It was hazy, not the best view but you get what you can.

At the bottom I was intrigued enough by a lunch vending machine to try it out. For 350¥ I got a box with a frozen chicken drumstick and some chips, which went into a microwave nearby for 4 minutes. Verdict: KFC standard, as expected, good for a quick snack. After that another cone of green tea icecream from a nearby store.

Then a bus to the resort town where there is an outdoor exhibit of a couple of buildings, a block of flats and a sports centre, which were abandoned after being engulfed by mudslides caused by an eruption of a nearby cone in 2000.  Then back to the hostel to soak in the onsen and call it a day.