"Even the birds do not fly to Ezo," went a popular 19th-century saying about Japan's northernmost island. "Ezo" means "land of barbarians." Settlement tamed it into "Hokkaido" — "north sea road." But it was a rough passage.

Pioneers from the mainland — for centuries a trickle, by the late 1800s a steady flow — were of all kinds. Gold prospectors and other adventurers brought their moral values, Christian utopians theirs. The latter cleared forests to found paradise on Earth; the former polluted rivers panning for instant riches, damn the cost to others — Ainu fishing the same rivers for salmon, for instance. Between these moral extremes were traders, drifters and refugees from all sorts of misfortunes — legal, financial, meteorological. If a storm destroyed your land back home or personal calamity your prospects, the Hokkaido wilderness offered — or seemed to — hope in despair.

Many came unprepared. The winter cold was beyond anything they'd known, the summer mosquitoes likewise. Disease raged. Many died. Not a few went mad. Hokkaido today, with its tourism, agribusiness and blandly commercial city life, shows little of its tortured past.