Surveyed to date · 10 corridors · 1,616 km
Every distance, gradient and journey time here is computed from real coordinates — OpenStreetMap road data through an open-source routing engine, and the national elevation model for the passes. Shaded corridors are written up. The hairlines are next.
Coverage
Latest sheets
Sheet 10 · Southern Hokkaido · Tokachi and Hidaka
The road between Hiroo and Shoya is called the Golden Road because of what it cost. Not what it earns, and not what it looks like at sunrise: in 1934, when the coastal route
Read the sheet →Sheet 09 · Western Hokkaido · Ishikari and Rumoi
For twenty-eight years this road was a national highway that did not go anywhere. Route 231 was designated in 1953, and for most of the distance between Sapporo and Rumoi it simply did not
Read the sheet →Sheet 08 · Central Hokkaido · Hidaka and Tokachi
Every sheet on this site so far has been a road you drive because it is better than the alternative. This one is the road that, for fourteen months, was the alternative — and
Read the sheet →Sheet 07 · Central and Eastern Hokkaido · Tokachi
The last sheet was a road with a gate at each end, shut for half the year by design. This one is its opposite: two hundred and forty-two kilometres from Furano to Kushiro across
Read the sheet →Sheet 06 · Eastern Hokkaido · Shiretoko
Thirty-one kilometres of road cross the Shiretoko peninsula, from Utoro on the Sea of Okhotsk to Rausu on the Nemuro Strait, over a pass at 744 m. For something close to half the year
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Hokkaido
What the roads are actually like, what changed on 1 September 2026, and the ¥50,000 hole in the insurance advice everyone repeats.
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Route 243 230 km Sheet 05 · Eastern Hokkaido · Okhotsk and Kushiro
Three lakes sit in a row across the eastern side of the island, each one the flooded scar of something that blew up, and a single day of driving links all three. Two hundred
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Hokkaido Route 2 46 km Sheet 04 · Southern Hokkaido · Iburi
Forty-six kilometres from a boiling crater to a caldera lake, over a pass that tops out just under nine hundred metres — hell valley and its ten waters, the Orofure climb, a mountain that redrew the map three times in a century, and fireworks every night until the end of October.
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Route 5 290 km Sheet 03 · Southern Hokkaido · Oshima
Close to three hundred kilometres down the island's southern spine to Hakodate — the paperwork, the coast road versus the toll road, a lake under an active volcano, and the port city with the three-star night view.
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Route 229 70 km Sheet 02 · Western Hokkaido · Shiribeshi
Seventy kilometres of cliffs, tunnels and improbably blue sea out to Hokkaido's only marine park — with a whisky distillery on the way, and a season that decides everything.
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