"It is Japan, but yet there is a difference somehow.''
-- Isabella Bird, 1878

Japan's story begins with rice and pottery; Hokkaido's, with mammoths and obsidian. The element of art and refinement apparent in Japan's earliest known past is missing from Hokkaido's. The brute struggle for existence loomed too large in the harsh northern environment. Obsidian, an early civilizing influence, was not a softening one. The mammoth hunters first discovered the black volcanic glass some 20,000 years ago in the broad Tokachi plain. What first drew them to it -- the deadly sharp point it could be honed to? Or the beauty of its glint when it caught the sun?

"Hokkaido," said travel writer J.D. Bisignani, "is the adopted child of modern Japan." The adoption process was long and slow. For 1,300 years, Hokkaido was an orphan called Ezo (meaning "alien people of the north"). Nobody knew much about it. Few cared. There is a brief reference to it in the "Nihon shoki," a seventh-century chronicle. A certain Abe-no-Hirafu, it says, drove the Ainu north to Ezo. If Ezo meant anything at all to premodern Japanese, it meant savagery. And savagery, to newly civilized people proud of their escape from it, has no redeeming features.