The End of the Road

In May 1944, Japanese author Dazai Osamu traveled to the Tsugaru Peninsula in Aomori Prefecture, where he had been born and raised, and produced a book about it that same year, titled Tsugaru (in English, 1985’s Return to Tsugaru). Forty-four years later, in May 1988, British writer Alan Booth, following in Dazai’s footsteps, visited many of the same places and eventually published his own account, first in Japanese, and then posthumously in English as one of the three narratives in the 1995 travel memoir Looking for the Lost.

Looking for the Lost is subtitled Journeys Through a Vanishing Japan, and it is clear in the text that what is “vanishing” is Japan’s traditional rural culture. Of Tsugaru, Booth writes, a map gives the impression that once past Aomori City, “you will pass through a succession of increasingly rustic villages of a kind conjured up by the word Tsugaru when it enters the urban Japanese imagination,” as the region was famous “for having preserved a way of life most of Japan has tossed away but still likes to think is ‘truly Japanese’” (1995, p. 5). But in 1988, the Seikan Tunnel connecting Honshu and Hokkaido had just been completed, and throughout Booth’s account he observes how modernisation had changed even this once-remote region via highways, concrete breakwaters, and cement factories.

Thirty-eight years after Booth’s journey, in 2026, it is not a way of life that is vanishing in rural areas like the Tsugaru Peninsula, but the rural areas themselves, at least as human settlements. By now, the numbers are as well known as they are stark. The population of Japan as a whole is expected to drop 15-20% by 2050 (see, for example, National Institute of Population and Social Security Research, 2023), but in rural prefectures like Aomori, the fall may be 40 percent or more, and possibly 60-70 percent in some of the towns and villages of the Tsugaru Peninsula. And this is only from now; throughout Tsugaru, the population has already been declining for decades.

Much has been written about this depopulation: its apparent causes, its seemingly impossible remedies, its likely effects. I wanted to examine it through the lens of the travelogue, comparing what Dazai and Booth had described with my own observations. So I made plans to cycle around Tsugaru at the beginning of June.

“By yourself?” my wife asked.

“It’s not a good time for anyone else,” I said. “And I’ll be able to concentrate better.”

“But what about the bears?”

“I’m not going hiking in the mountains. I’m cycling.”

“The bears are everywhere!”

And from that day in April until I left for Aomori on June 3, she texted me articles several times a week about bear sightings in Tohoku. The one that was the most incredible was unfortunately one of the most relevant; on the afternoon of May 15, an adult Asian black bear somehow made its way to the centre of Aomori City and into a building complex containing a hotel. The animal was more than five kilometres from anything that could possibly be considered a bear habitat… and not even a kilometre from where I was planning to stay myself the first night. The building had to be closed for hours, the guests of the hotel forced to remain in their rooms, until the animal was finally shot and killed.

There is not a single mention of bears in Return to Tsugaru, even though Dazai made at least part of his journey on foot. Booth walked around the entire peninsula, but he makes no mention of them either, except when reminiscing about Hokkaido and translating a poem. But that was then and this is now; according to the Ministry of the Environment, black bear sightings across the country in the past three years have exploded, increasing from roughly 20,000 in 2024 to more than 50,000 in 2025 (2026a). Bear attacks on humans are also up (2026b).

So despite still feeling mildly ridiculous (I was cycling), I brought a bear whistle with me just in case.

•••

In 1944, Dazai calls Aomori City “inhospitable,” with "strangely sooty, expressionless houses," that overall "does not seem to make much of an impression on strangers” (1985, p. 4). But he also calls it a “bustling port” (p. 9) and says “[i]t is refreshing to see a new town prosper” (p. 20). He puts the population at 100,000 or so, which appears more or less correct. When Booth arrived in 1988, this number had tripled, and the city seemed just as bustling. Without a reservation in hand, he was turned away from every hotel he tried—“We’re full up every night of the year,” he was told at a tourist information desk (1995, p. 4)—until he agreed to stay in a so-called “friendly room,” where he would have to share with another guest if one arrived. Every salesman passed through Aomori, he was told by way of explanation; a fourteen-story tourist centre in the shape of a pyramid had opened on the port two years earlier; and an expo to celebrate the opening of the Seikan Tunnel was coming that summer.

For both of them, it was a lengthy journey northward. It took Dazai more than fourteen hours to reach Aomori from Ueno Station in Tokyo via an overnight express. It took Booth at least six; the Tohoku Shinkansen opened in 1982 but for many years operated only between Omiya and Morioka, in Iwate. Even traveling in the midst of a typhoon, I made it in 3 hours and 19 minutes. It has never been faster or easier to get to Aomori from Tokyo, but by the same token, it has never been faster or easier to leave. And leave people have, every single year for more than twenty years. According to official Aomori City data, there were 257,058 residents on April 1, 2026. But I arrived on June 3. Assuming a rate of decline at least equal to the year before, there were roughly 708 fewer residents by then, statistically, and there would be 11 or 12 fewer residents when I woke up in the city the next day.[1]

On the front door of the business hotel where I was staying was a sign with an illustration of a bear in front of an open door that read “Please be sure to close this door!”[2] I had had no trouble booking my room, would not have even if I had booked the day before, and it was cheap: 6300 yen (approximately 40 USD) including breakfast. After checking in, I went out to find a place for dinner. Almost immediately I passed a historical marker featuring Dazai, who went to high school here and whose student residence had been near my hotel. There were a handful of people on this street, which led right to the main shotengai (shopping arcade) and the station, but once I turned off it, I saw almost no one. No one on the street with the Richmond Hotel, where the bear had ended up on May 15; no one, not even cars, on the street terminating at the sightseeing pyramid. Off in the distance, I could hear the sound of recorded festival drums.

I had been to Aomori three times before, once for the Nebuta festival, and then to see Hirosaki and other parts of the prefecture. I was curious if a small izakaya I had been to with my wife on one of those trips was still in business, and it was. There were eventually three other customers, each of them alone: two regulars and a tourist from Shizuoka. One of the regulars was a youngish salesman. He sat at the counter next to me and while I was there drank three large bottles of beer, occasionally pausing to smoke long, very thin cigarettes. He didn’t eat anything, and—unlike the rest of us—the proprietor didn’t offer him any food. The other regular was a woman in her sixties or seventies who had a bag with a large yellow stuffed pikachu in it.

I asked about the bear at the hotel, and how in the world it had gotten there. Pikachu thought it had come from the direction of the prefectural art museum, which backed up onto the forest. Thin Cigarette’s theory was that the bear had found its way to a river and gotten into the city that way. In any case, there were never that many people on the street, so he could understand it not being noticed. Before coming to Aomori this time, I would have dismissed that as outlandish—the bear had gotten to the centre of town!—but having just seen all the empty streets myself, at 6 pm on a weekday, I had to nod in bewildered agreement. Still, perhaps it was just a freak occurrence. There had been breathless reports about bears on the TV news in Tokyo for at least two years now; I asked if this was something people in Aomori actually worried about. Yes! Pikachu said. She felt sorry for the bears—they didn’t have enough food. And people were stupid, leaving out garbage and picking wild vegetables where they shouldn’t and what not. Thin Cigarette added that all the hunters were getting too old, and it was too hard for new people to get hunting licenses. He also said something to the effect that Japanese people were too passive; if this were America, the problem would have been solved already. I wasn’t sure I agreed with that one, but the proprietor seemed to, at least in the sense that action was necessary. He said if you encountered a bear, there was only one thing to do, and that was to make yourself look as big as you could, and then if the bear kept coming to punch it in the nose.

•••

The streets were busier in the morning. Booth had walked out of Aomori City proper and up the coast on a blustery, rainy day and found “an unbroken line of shabby suburban houses, occasionally interrupted by a shabbier beauty parlor or a dusty barber’s shop that stank of pomade” (1995, p. 7). It was blustery but sunny when I cycled up the same road. For a while there were plenty of suburban houses, and I knew from long experience that wherever you go in Japan there are more barber shops than you would ever imagine. But I hadn’t gone very far when I came across the first abandoned school. The exterior clock had stopped at 9:20. A couple of windows were broken. A bat and a softball were still on the field, which had flowers and weeds coming up out of the ground. Just past the school, a large renovation contractor that Google Maps claimed was open had been gutted by fire some time ago. There was an abandoned gas station, soon followed by another. A closed liquor store. Here and there were some obviously new houses, and one real surprise: a seemingly new kindergarten, painted bright yellow. But then another abandoned school, this one with the clock frozen at 4:17. A big handwritten sign had been spread across the top floor windows: “School closed. Thank you, Uroshigata Elementary School.”

It was hard to tell if some places were closed forever or not. A liquor store that was supposed to be open still had its shutters down, even though it was past eleven in the morning. Other places had been so thoroughly vacated that I couldn’t tell what they had been before. For long stretches, I couldn’t go much more than a hundred metres without seeing an abandoned or ruined building. And I was still technically with the city limits.

I finally left Aomori City around noon and entered the village of Yomogita. Booth found a ryokan here to escape from the rain. After dinner, the proprietress recommended that he and the other guests visit a nearby bar called Charmant, run by a “famous singer,” and enjoy a little karaoke, but they all did a little singing at the ryokan instead (1995, p. 9). The bar was still there. I asked a man in a pickup if it was still a going concern. It was, he said, and the famous singer was 80 and still running it.

Booth’s ryokan, however, was gone. Down the road, the building that had once been the village office (the new one was inland, on a road that was a bypass) sat empty. The liquor store across from it looked permanently closed. As I looked around, wondering what to make of it, a man in perhaps his forties methodically walked up and down the streets, delivering pamphlets for the political party Sanseito.

Just before what used to be called Kanita, there was a pretty stretch of road next to the bay, the first really scenic spot of the trip so far. Dazai had gotten off the bus in Kanita and spent several days here visiting and drinking with an old friend. In Dazai’s day, it was the “biggest community” in the area, the population “well over five thousand” (1985, p. 32). Now it no longer existed as Kanita. In 2005, the town had merged with the villages of Tairadate and Minmaya, and was now called Sotogahama, which is what this stretch of coast has long been referred to as: the “Outer Shore.” At the time of the merger, Kanita’s population was less than four thousand, and even with the inclusion of the other two municipalities, there were fewer people in Sotogahama today than when Dazai visited Kanita in 1944 (Sotogahama Town, 2026).

Despite this, after what I had seen that morning, Sotogahama seemed almost hopeful. I counted three businesses specialising in home renovation, which indicated optimism. There was a convenience store. A little supermarket. A bigger supermarket. A big hospital. A medical clinic. A dental clinic. A florist. A coffee roaster. The grass along the river had been cut. There was a library on wheels, a large town office, and an elementary school with a sign on the top floor window reading: “100 points for friendliness.” Not far from the elementary school, a long vertical red sign put up by the town office read, on one side: “To not have accidents, let’s cheerfully do our best today, too;” and on the other side: “Today, too, welcome. Sotogahama is a town of peace.”

But when I looked it up, I found that there were only 63 students enrolled at the elementary school this year, in a building designed to fit many, many more. The little supermarket was only half a supermarket. The other half had been turned into a kind of library, with a coffee shop (connected to the coffee roaster) that was only open a few times a week. There was some art on exhibit, and lots of photographs—for some reason mostly of motorcycles—had been clipped to one wall. A display indicated that the space was related to a town redevelopment scheme. It was nice, but was it working? Many of the shops on the road near the sea were closed, even at three in the afternoon. Dazai and Booth had both eaten crab here (“Kanita” means “crab paddy”), but there was only one restaurant in town now that served crab, and it was closed, too.

I was staying at the only ryokan that was still operating. It was next to a river that emptied into the bay. Walking over the river, I saw hundreds of fish. Big fish, medium-sized fish, little fish in swarms like insects. And I guessed that there were probably far more fish in just this part of the river than people who lived in what used to be Kanita.

•••

The wind howled outside my window all night. In the morning, the bay, which had been so placid the day before, was dotted with whitecaps, and waves crashed into the concrete breakwaters. It was misty as I set off, and cold enough that I needed gloves. Plastic fishing floats bigger than basketballs, all different colors, some covered in barnacles, were piled high on both sides of the road, some in a seemingly organised fashion, others in ditches. There were stacks of blue nets everywhere as well. According to Dazai, the nets were “countless,” (1985, p. 41) and I had to agree; some of the stacks were so high they nearly reached the top of the buildings they were in front of. No nets seemed to be in use; they were just in stacks. All the fishing boats seemed to be in. No one was selling fish. Dazai writes: "In the town, now as in the past, the fishmongers pile up the fish in their bicycle carts every morning and peddle their wares in the street, roaring at the top of their voices, as if in anger" (p. 41). This was hard to imagine, and not for the first time, I felt that 1944 was farther away than simply the number of years indicated.

There were scallop shells every so often on the side of the road. I saw one massive home that had collapsed on one side; the residential equivalent of the Batman villain Two Face. On a concrete pier, hundreds of birds stood facing the sea. Then all at once they flew off the pier and sat on the waves.

Dazai had taken the bus from Kanita to Imabetsu, and from the bus “every village looked snug and cheerful” (1985, p. 69). I was not expecting cheerful; in fact, I was expecting the overall level of dilapidation to get much worse after what used to be central Kanita, but for a while things seemed to improve. Many houses had clearly been renovated. There were well-tended vegetable gardens covered with nets. But then, after I entered what used to be called Tairadate, everything did get much worse. Next to the water, a long boathouse was falling apart. In one section there was still a boat, crushed under rotting timber and other debris. Not much further down the road was another boathouse just like it. No one was on the street, and parking spaces were largely empty next to vacant-looking or collapsed houses.

Booth had passed through Tairadate on his way up the coast and been turned away from the first ryokan he tried, which was hosting a funeral party, but had stayed at the second (1995, p. 16). There were no ryokans now; there were few businesses of any type, at least on the road near the bay. I found a little grocery store next to a service station, both closed long ago. There was a general store of sorts that was half empty, with some liquor and snacks and a few nice-looking ceramics. Passing an improbable sign for children crossing, I turned to investigate and found a community centre that had once been the local elementary school. A little further inland the junior high school had been closed. There was a sign in the window like the one I had seen yesterday: “Taira Junior High, thank you,” but the kanji for “Taira” had fallen on its side. Back closer to the bay, all that remained of a nursery school were the gateposts. The path leading inside had been overgrown, and the grass was thigh-high.

It all felt post-apocalyptic; it was stunning. Near the end of the village there was a house with a for sale sign, the first I had noticed along this stretch, and it seemed to me to be utterly delusional.

•••

Like Booth had before me, I wandered into Tsugaru Quasi National Park. He seems to have not been impressed (1995, p. 17); I was happy to see pine trees rather than ruins. Not far into the park was a pension with a ramen shop, a lighthouse, a campground and a michi no eki: a rest stop that sells souvenirs, hot drinks and food, and offers tourist information. Like all michi no eki, this one had a huge parking lot, but there was only one car in it, along with a motorcycle that was driven off soon after I arrived. I nursed a cup of coffee for thirty minutes, and until the very end of it, I was the only customer. A young woman stood at the cash register and occasionally answered the phone. She was the first woman I had seen under the age of 50 in more than 24 hours.

Down the road, I found a boat with weeds growing out of it, then a shipping container with weeds growing around it. What appeared to be five abandoned places in a row, one so hidden by overgrowth I could hardly see it. If it weren’t for the occasional smell of a wood-burning stove and smoke coming out of some chimney pipes, I would have thought there were no occupied residences along some blocks at all. In many of the houses, there were paper screens behind the windows, and all the screens were ripped to shreds.

Much as had happened earlier that morning, I then came across another area that seemed relatively prosperous. Cars in most of the driveways. Gardens. The driver of a dry cleaner’s delivery van bowed at a woman in front of house. For lunch, I had curry on the outskirts of Imabetsu proper, served in a surprisingly well-decorated café on a hill with a lovely view of the sea.

According to Dazai, in 1944 "Imabetsu is a cheerful—one would almost like to say modern—port. Its population is perhaps close to four thousand." (1985, p. 76) Booth describes Imabetsu in 1988 as “three-quarters dead,” and “among the most dilapidated” of the Tsugaru coastal villages (1995, p. 18), a phrase which had filled me with trepidation for weeks before this trip. If Imabetsu had been that poorly off near the height of Japan’s economic bubble, what could it possibly be like now?

A couple of big closed businesses on the outskirts of town, including a Daihatsu dealership for which all that remained was a sign, made me think the worst, but then there was a construction company with a couple dozen cars in the parking lot, and a downtown that, if not thriving, had at least not given up. There was a photo store, a florist, a watch seller that had to be at least 50 years old, and a cycle shop that was equally old. New posters of politicians, including Prime Minister Takaichi, the first ones I had seen of her in Aomori, had been plastered on exterior walls. Two colourful billboards just down a hill advertised Imabetsu’s attractions. There was a walking map for tourists. A cycling map. Signs in English and Japanese indicating the direction of the town office, the farmers market, the elementary school. The elementary school was huge. A group of kids were outside on the field running around, the first children I had seen in two days. On the Imabetsu town website, 42 students were reported to have been enrolled in April 2023; updates stopped there.

The most prosperous-looking part of Imabetsu turned out to be at the crossroads of the inland bypass, where there was a convenience store, a gas station, and a home centre that sold groceries, fresh vegetables, and liquor in addition to pharmaceuticals, cosmetics, shoes, lumber, and small electronics like fans. But this prosperity had its limits. Next to the home centre was a pachinko parlour called “Ocean” in English that looked like it had been closed for 20 years or more. The “O” in “Ocean” had dropped off, the “PACHINKO” had fallen forward and was nearly touching the roof, and a tree had fallen on top of the last three letters. Wandering back to the seaside, I found the local junior high school, and it was so quiet outside I looked it up then and there. There had been 16 students here in 2023, but only two new ones, and like for the elementary school, that was when the website updates stopped.

Dazai had visited his friend M in Imabetsu on the way to Minmaya in 1944. I found what had been M’s house on my second ride through downtown. It was a boarded up wooden affair, probably quite snug and cheerful in Dazai’s day, with an explanatory sign in the front. The last two sentences read: “At the time [of Dazai’s visit], it was a newly built rental house where a pharmacy was operated. Unfortunately, it is currently unoccupied.” I had to smile at the word “currently.” No one would ever live in this house again.

Leaving town, I saw the first rice fields of the trip, near another abandoned gas station and some incredibly worn snack bars that might have still been in business and might not. Then I entered what used to be Minmaya (now the northernmost section of Sotogahama), and things turned bad again. Booth had found Minmaya more visibly affluent than Imabetsu in 1988 (1995, p. 20-21), but this could no longer be said. On one stretch of hilly road “downtown,” there was a permanently closed restaurant, half-covered in vines, followed by a liquor store on the other side of the street that also seemed to be permanently closed, but with items still visible on the shelves: slippers, stuffed animals, a couple pieces of pottery, several folded empty boxes of beer. A little further up the hill sat a vacant dentist’s office even more covered in vines than the restaurant, and then a seemingly empty building with a sign out front with just the kanji for salt.

Along the road that ran parallel to the sea were rows of apartment blocks. There were a few cars in the parking lot; at least some people lived here. Unexpectedly, there was also a convenience store, with a large gymnasium across from it that had an empty parking lot, but the convenience store clerk assured me it was still in operation. Near the gymnasium were two nursing homes right next to each other and a clinic. The clinic was open only two days a week, and only in the morning. The elementary school had closed the year before, and all the students moved to the junior high school building, which was quite a ways up the road (certainly not walkable for small children). There were nineteen students in total, according to the combined school newsletter, and no new elementary students this year.

That afternoon, I met a woman in perhaps her seventies who was sturdy and chatty. The beginning of the end, she said eventually, was when the town’s summer festival was cancelled. There weren’t enough people to hold it properly. But that was what everyone lived for, she said, why you endured the long winter. When it started to get warm, you started preparing for the festival. The Minmaya Nebuta Matsuri was different from the famous one in Aomori City, she said. There weren’t just floats, there was dancing, too. But now the festival was gone, and in August there was just nothing, unless you went to Imabetsu. She never heard children’s voices anymore. Graves were disappearing because no one took care of them. I asked her what was going to become of Tsugaru, and she said, “Nakunarimasu.” (“It will disappear”). There were fewer than 5000 childbirths in all of Aomori Prefecture last year, did I know that?

No, I had not. But I looked it up later, and she was right (Ministry of Health, Labour, and Welfare, 2026).

I was the only guest at my ryokan in Minmaya, and it was the only ryokan. It wasn’t on the water, but it faced the sea. Dazai had also stayed in Minmaya, when it turned out to be impossible to take the ferry to Cape Tappi. His ryokan had faced the sea, too (1985, p. 83). Mine didn’t seem to be the same one, but it was old enough to have been there when Dazai passed through. In the front room were several antiques: a table with a type of finish the proprietress told me later was unique to the region; etched glass panels that she said were irreplaceable—no one made them anymore. Dinner was delicious. "The inns of Sotogahama all seem to be too good for their towns," (p. 83), Dazai writes, and whatever other changes time had wrought, this statement was just as true 82 years later.

•••

The next morning it was raining, and even colder than the day before. As I ate breakfast, the ryokan’s proprietress worried aloud about me biking over the hills to the west coast of the peninsula alone. She especially didn’t like the idea of me biking in shorts in the rain. Both of us checked the radar. I sat in her dining room for a couple of hours, hoping the weather would clear, and she gave me a cup of hot corn soup while I waited.

The rain hadn’t completely stopped at half past nine, but I didn’t think it was going to get any better, so I put on my raincoat and slipped some plastic booties over my shoes and headed for Cape Tappi. Both Dazai and Booth had walked this “desolate road along the shore” (Dazai, 1985 p. 65). Dazai in 1944 makes a distinction between the "bleak and windswept hamlets between Minmaya and Tappi” and “the villages south of Minmaya, especially in Minmaya itself and in Imabetsu, [where] I could see how serene life can be in the cheerful atmosphere of those trim, well-appointed harbours" (p. 66). Booth remarks incredibly at that latter description (1995, p. 23); I felt there was hardly any difference between north of Minmaya and south of it, except in the vegetation that covered the rocks, and the sheer amount of concrete that had been poured down many of the hills to keep them from collapsing. Otherwise, “bleak and windswept” applied just as well to the towns and villages I had already passed to the small communities I passed now.

At the edge of central Minmaya was a house with anime posters all over it; it turned out to be the last real splash of colour until the end of the peninsula. On an equally dark and rainy day thirty-eight years ago, Booth had seen several grocer’s vans along this length of coast, each with blaring loudspeakers (1995, p. 24); I saw only one, not in use and silent. As before, there was a stretch where many houses looked spruced up and occupied, but then, not long after, I passed through a hamlet with perhaps twelve homes in all, only two of which appeared to be even habitable. All the way to Tappi, I thought of this sentence from Dazai: "In the villages we passed through, girls would dart out from behind the houses and disappear again immediately. Their white skin and neat clothes gave them an air of elegance” (1985, p. 88). I did not see a single girl, elegant or otherwise, and over 11 kilometres, only two cars overtook me.

Dazai and Booth had stayed at the same ryokan at Cape Tappi. It had been converted to a tourist information centre several years ago but had closed permanently the past March. Across from it, guarded by concrete lions and polar bears, was a stone monument to Dazai on which there was a passage from Return to Tsugaru warning the reader that if they walk northward, “ever northward,” in the end they will come to this “strange” place, “and there you will have come to the absolute end of your road” (1985, p. 91). Cape Tappi did indeed feel like the end, and not just of the road—of everything. Where the road stopped at the harbour, there was a little eatery that seemed closed forever, collapsed buildings, seemingly abandoned boats. There were several homes and a post office on the way to the harbour, and I knew people came here to see the Dazai monument and the “highway” of stairs that goes up to the inland road, but there was no one in sight today.

When I turned around, the wind blew the rain directly into my face. I biked up and then down to the Seikan Tunnel Museum. There were fourteen cars and a shuttle bus in the parking lot, which was something, at least. Somewhere nearby was a proper hotel, on a hill with a view of the Tsugaru Strait, and I wondered how many people were staying there that weekend (it was Saturday), but I was too cold and wet to try to find out.

From Cape Tappi, Dazai walked back to Minmaya, then made his way back to Aomori City before heading inland. In 1944 there was supposedly no road over the mountains. By 1988 there was, and Booth used at least part of it on his way to Lake Jusan, on the west coast of the peninsula, but the route as he describes it is a little unclear. For me, I was bound for what had once been called Kodomari, and as I cycled up Route 339, I heard only the wind in the trees and the slowly revolving windmills, which sounded like aeroplane propellers that couldn’t quite get going. It was somewhat unnerving. Near the crest of the hills, I was enveloped in fog, and when I finally started to descend, the wind threatened to blow me and my little bicycle off the road. But just after noon, I was on the other side of the peninsula, and the rain stopped.

It was prettier on this side than on the Outer Shore. Dazai writes of people “[referring] to the Sotogahama region as the kage, the dark side (because it lies in the shade of the mountains)” (1985, p. 41), and comparing the two, I saw what he meant. The hills were a nicer shade of green, and there were more conventionally scenic views. There were no hamlets on this side, not yet. I passed an abandoned building that had been a ryokan not long ago, but a few kilometres later came upon an attractive michi no eki that was part of larger, well-designed complex including an auto camp. There was a clean-looking beach that faced west, and the sunset was advertised as beautiful. I ate shijimi (freshwater clam) ramen for lunch and spent an hour trying to dry off and not entirely succeeding.

Kodomari, which had been the northernmost fishing village on the west side of the peninsula (and still is, under a new name), is the setting for the climax of Return to Tsugaru, in which Dazai meets his former nanny Take again after many years. As Dazai describes it, Take had in effect been his mother from the time he was two until the age of seven, at which point she had left his family’s house abruptly. With the exception of an awkward encounter a year later, he had not seen her since. Determined to find her, he sets out by bus from Goshogawara to Kodomari, but the house he is told is Take’s is empty. He wanders the streets of the village the rest of the day without any luck, but just when he has given up, he returns to the house and meets Take’s daughter. She takes him to Take, who is at a sports meet being held concurrently with a festival. The reunion is subdued, but sitting next to Take, Dazai finds himself “completely happy,” and “without the slightest concern for what might happen next” (1985, p. 167). “Is this the kind of feeling that is meant by ‘peace’?” he asks. “If it is I can say that my heart experienced peace then for the first time in my life” (p. 167).

This account has been determined to be “ninety percent fiction” (Westerhoven 1985, p. xxiii). Nevertheless, in what is now called Nakadomari, (the fishing village of Kodomari and the inland town of Nakasato merged to form a new municipality in 2005), I found Dazai’s words about peace on a stone monument on the grounds of a museum commemorating Return to Tsugaru, along with a statue of Dazai and Take sitting together. Nakadomari at the outset was the best-looking town I had seen on the peninsula. There were big houses, well kept, and a combined kindergarten, elementary, and junior high school that looked brand new. But it was a pretty day by this point, and as I biked though what used to be Kodomari from one end to the other, I saw exactly two people outside: a disreputable-looking guy in a track suit with an overgrown poodle, who snapped at me, and an old woman.

The harbour side of town was not quite as nice, but there was a coffee shop and a florist (again!), a fishing supply store that also sold snacks and alcohol, a couple of restaurants, and two places to stay instead of one. Still hardly any visible people, however. When I finally met one an hour later, I asked how the local economy was and was told there basically wasn’t one. The fishing industry had collapsed a few years ago, the woman said. There had always at least been squid, and now even the squid were gone, maybe because the waters were warmer because of climate change; she wasn’t sure. Her Japanese was very easy to understand, and it occurred to me that I hadn’t heard anyone speaking anything that sounded like dialect the entire trip. The proprietress at my ryokan in Minmaya had taught me the Tsugaru word for “east wind” (which I had already forgotten) but that was it. The peninsula had long been known for its local language, but I was told in Nakadomari that, oh no, TV had put a stop to that. Only the really old folks spoke much Tsugaru-ben anymore.

Though he discusses Dazai’s encounter with Take at length, Booth seemed to visit Kodomari as an afterthought, devoting less than a full page to it, and his main comment is a complaint about the view from his room being of “concrete poles and wires” (1995, p. 144). The view from my room was of the harbour and the sea beyond, and I thought to myself: I win.

•••

When I left what had been Kodomari in the morning, it was sunny and warm. As before I saw exactly two people on the street as I biked through town on my way out. Not the same two people as on the ride in. But still. Crossing the narrow Kodomari peninsula, over a rise I could see the top of Mt. Iwaki pointing out of the clouds and the Japan Sea in front of it. Soon enough I was biking along the water again. A few solo fishermen were out trying their luck to my right. Lush green hills were to my left. The Tsugaru Plain shimmered in the distance. At the first little village, there was a long, white building with a steepled roof that looked like a convent, but of course it was a nursing home. On the other side of the street was an expensive-looking, well-built modern home with a big backyard, a huge brick chimney, and a front that was all windows facing the sea. There didn’t seem to be anyone there, but the yard looked kept up. It was easily the nicest-looking house I had seen in Tsugaru. Across the front lane from it, however, were what could only be called skeletons of old wooden buildings. I hesitated to even consider them structures at this point. Planted in the ground nearby was a wooden post put up by the prefecture that read: “The blue ocean is everyone’s treasure.” A little further down, three cars were parked between two houses so dilapidated, I didn’t understand how anyone could be living there. Further down still was a huge collapsed house, right in front of the sea, a gorgeous view, with the front door somehow perfectly intact.

All the way down the coast, and then down the side of Lake Jusan, I kept passing cozy wooden bus stops for an elementary school. The bus route was so long, I finally stopped and looked up the school. It was on the north side of the lake. According to the Goshogawara City website, it had become a combined elementary/junior high school just this year. All the junior high students had come back to the elementary school building—their own building had been vacated. There were 31 students in total, and no new elementary students.

Soon even 31 students combined seemed like a lot. I passed a giant, grassy field with cherry blossom trees near the road and two posts to mark an entrance. The elementary school that had once been here was now completely gone. There was a stone memorial next to what had been the gate. The school song was chiseled on the memorial, and there were rows of flowers in front of it that I couldn’t help thinking were substitutes for children.

On the other side of the lake were windmills. I wondered why there weren’t more throughout the peninsula; the wind was constant. Then green rice fields, just a few at the start, but once the lake was a memory they stretched as far as I could see. For the first time, Tsugaru seemed charmingly bucolic, and for perhaps an hour I did not notice a single abandoned or ruined building.

Entering what used to be Kanagi (it is now part of Goshogawara), I saw children out and about for the first time in three days. Later, in town, I met a woman with an actual baby, and it felt like a deleted scene from Children of Men. Dazai had been born in Kanagi, and his name was everywhere. There was a Dazai café, a Dazai museum, and a Dazai street. There was a photo of Dazai on a vending machine in the train station with a speech bubble that read: “Offering this price now only!” I discovered I would just miss a “Dazai Week” from June 13 to 19. There would be special lectures by university professors and other events. You would be able to get discounted admission to Dazai’s family home if you had the name Dazai, Osamu, Tsushima, or Shuji (Dazai’s real name was Tsushima Shuji) or if your birthday was the same as Dazai’s on June 19. A note on the poster said to feel free to cosplay Dazai, and I thought, good lord. Dazai had been a brilliant writer. He had also been the spoiled son of a rich moneylending family and a boozing, sometime drug addict who had cheated on both his first wife and his second one with bar girls and other women, two of whom had died next to him, one in a double suicide attempt that Dazai alone survived, and the other in the double suicide that ended his life. This in a country where now, if a female TV personality was caught having an affair with a married man, her career was over.

But I couldn’t blame the town for trying. They had Dazai and not much else. In front of the train station that Sunday at midday, nothing was open. There were hardly any actual businesses. Several storefronts had been clearly abandoned. There was a barber shop directly across from the station with a sign that said it was open, but it was long gone. Making my way toward Dazai’s family home, the situation only somewhat improved. There was, however, an open florist and an open photo shop, and I wondered what it was about both types of businesses that had kept them alive throughout the peninsula.

Dazai’s family home was now called Shayokan (“The Hall of the Setting Sun”), after one of his final novels. Booth writes of seeing it in the distance, “a tall, impressively-roofed building” that “dominated” the skyline (1995, p. 45), which was hard to believe. On the other hand, he also writes that Kanagi was “easily the most prosperous-looking of all the townships of the plain and felt more like a resort on the Izu peninsula than an outpost of the bleak and bitter north” (p. 134), so perhaps time had really changed the area that much. Dazai’s family had been forced to sell the house after the war, and it had been turned into a ryokan, where Booth had stayed in 1988. Now it was a museum that I wandered through with a few other tourists, noting the odd mix of tatami and brick, and the rooms where hundreds of tenant rice farmers had come every year, hat in hand, looking for money to help them make it through the harvest. One of the museum labels said in English that “it seems that Dazai did not really like his family’s business,” and by the time I had read enough about it, neither did I.

As I left Kanagi, it began to get colder. Mt. Iwaki peeked out again from above the clouds. It looked so much from this side like a smaller Mt. Fuji that I stopped in front of yet another abandoned gas station to see if I could get a decent photo, but no.

•••

Goshogawara was once the third biggest city in Aomori. In 1944, Dazai calls it “lively—or noisy—depending on how you look at it,” and “tinged with that frightful loneliness characteristic of big cities” (1985, p. 1). Visiting it in 1988, Booth found stylishly-dressed men and beautician-coiffed women “strolling along bustling arcades” with boutiques and cake shops, McDonalds and Mister Donuts, and department stores that could be seen from far outside the city limits. (1995, p. 45-46) But for the first time on the trip, nothing I saw seemed at all like either of them had described it.

Goshogawara was not lively or noisy. There were a few pedestrians, including a couple of teenagers, which seemed exotic after four days in Tsugaru, but there were no department stores downtown near the train station, no covered shopping arcades, no McDonalds, and no Mister Donuts. The three nicest buildings in town were the Tachineputa Museum, which was closed for renovations, the city hall, and the bank next to it. I wondered what the taxpayers thought of that. There was a giant hospital. There were abandoned buildings everywhere, even on what was called “Haikara Dori” (“High Class Street”). A few specialty places were trying to make a go of things: a hamburger/rib joint, an apple brandy distillery, a coffee shop. But they were few and far between.

I didn’t understand. But on Haikara Dori I finally noticed a sign on a vacated building that must have been nice in its day, a store that had once sold glasses and watches and jewelry. The sign said that a new, completely renovated shop was now open in “Elm.” That sounded like a shopping mall. I looked it up, and sure enough, that’s what it was. It was a solid thirty minutes on foot from the train station, an unthinkable distance in Tokyo, so I biked to it.

Everyone in Goshogawara seemed to be there. The parking lot was packed with cars. The mall was packed with people. People of all ages, shopping at Loppia, Kaldi, Uniqlo, McDonalds and Mister Donut, Pizza Hut, a big box electronics store, Daiso, every shop the modern Japanese customer wants. It was lively—or noisy—depending on how you looked at it. And I realised that Goshogawara was no longer really a city. It was like a sprawling suburb, just one with no centre. That shopping mall and the chain stores that were in and around it could have been anywhere in Tokyo. But in Tokyo there were decent jobs. In Tokyo the trains ran more than once an hour. In Tokyo there was better weather.

The next day was rainy. I put my bike in a bag and took the train back to Aomori City to see the shopping arcades, which I had missed initially. Most of the shops were open. There were images from the Nebuta Matsuri here and there, and they were fun to look at. A few times I heard the recorded sounds of festival drums again. But when I left that Monday afternoon, there were nevertheless, statistically, about 45 fewer people living in Aomori City than there had been when I had started biking up the coast, a few short days ago.

Notes

[1] Of course, actual demographic change is not so tidy.

[2] Signs mentioned in the text have been translated from Japanese unless otherwise indicated.

References

Aomori City 2026, Population, number of households, etc (Basic Resident Register) (Japanese: Jinko setai suto (jumin kihon daicho)). Available at: https://www.city.aomori.aomori.jp/shisei/toukei/1006137.html (Accessed June 14, 2026)

Booth, A 1995, Looking for the lost: journeys through a vanishing Japan, Kodansha America, New York.

Dazai, O 1985, Return to Tsugaru, trans. J. Westerhoven, Kodansha International, New York, original work published 1944.

Goshogawara City 2026, Official website. Available at https://www.city.goshogawara.lg.jp/ (Accessed: June 21, 2026).

Imabetsu Town 2026, Official website. Available at https://www.town.imabetsu.lg.jp/ (Accessed: June 21, 2026).

Ministry of the Environment 2026a, Information on bear sightings (Preliminary figures) (Japanese: Kuma-rui no shutsubotsu joho ni tsuite [sokuho chi]). Available at: https://www.env.go.jp/nature/choju/effort/effort12/syutubotu.pdf (Accessed: June 14, 2026).

Ministry of the Environment 2026b, Injuries caused by bears to humans (Preliminary figures) (Japanese: Kuma-rui ni yoru jinshin higai ni tsuite [sokuho chi]). Available at: https://www.env.go.jp/nature/choju/effort/effort12/injury-qe.pdf (Accessed: June 14, 2026).

Ministry of Health, Labour, and Welfare 2026, Overview of the annual summary of the monthly demographic statistics report 2025 (Preliminary figures) (Japanese: Reiwa 7 (2025)-nen jinko dotai tokeigeppo nenkei (gaisu) no gaikyo). Available at: https://www.mhlw.go.jp/toukei/saikin/hw/jinkou/geppo/nengai25/dl/gaikyouR7.pdf

National Institute of Population and Social Security Research 2023, Population projections for Japan (2023 revision): 2021 to 2070. Available at https://www.ipss.go.jp/pp-zenkoku/j/zenkoku2023/pp2023e_Summary.pdf (Accessed: June 14, 2026)

Sotogahama Town 2026, Official website. Available at https://www.town.sotogahama.lg.jp/home.html (Accessed: June 14, 2026).

Westerhoven, J 1985, ‘Translator’s preface’, in O Dazai, Return to Tsugaru, trans. J. Westerhoven, Kodansha International, New York.

Article copyright Patrick Foss.

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