Kushiro: Walking with Ainu History and Swimming Deer
Kushiro: Walking with Ainu History and Swimming Deer
— David Eugene Perry
24 September 2026: Ahoy! Alfredo and I set foot in Japan for the first time in 26 years with a walk about Kushiro on a glorious warm day.
From Westerdam, we took a short 15-minute shuttle ride into central Kushiro, where we set off on foot. Almost immediately, Kushiro gave us one of the more unexpected sights of the trip: an Ezo sika deer swimming across one of the inner-city waterways. A large stag with a handsome rack of antlers, he appeared perfectly healthy and completely untroubled by his aquatic commute.
Later we saw a second deer swimming in the channel. This one appeared to have some sort of netting caught around his antlers. We hoped he wasn’t in distress, but standing there as visitors with no obvious way of contacting the Japanese equivalent of the SPCA, there was little we could do beyond watch and hope he made it safely to shore.
Deer are common throughout this part of Hokkaido and are surprisingly strong swimmers, so seeing one in the water is not necessarily a sign that something is wrong. Still, two swimming deer in one morning in the middle of the city was certainly not something we expected.
Our walk eventually took us to the Kushiro City Museum, dramatically situated beside Lake Harutori. The museum covers the natural and human history of eastern Hokkaido, including the wildlife of the Kushiro wetlands, archaeology, and the story of the region’s Indigenous Ainu people.
The Ainu exhibits were particularly interesting.
The Ainu are the Indigenous people of northern Japan, with their own language, spiritual traditions, clothing, foodways and culture. Their traditional homeland is most closely associated with Hokkaido, though historically Ainu communities also extended north into Sakhalin and the Kuril Islands.
Their ancestry is closely connected with the ancient Jōmon peoples, hunter-gatherer communities who inhabited the Japanese archipelago for thousands of years. The Jōmon are especially famous for producing some of the world’s earliest known pottery.
Beginning roughly during the first millennium BCE, migrations from the Asian continent brought wet-rice agriculture and what archaeologists call Yayoi culture to much of Japan. Over many centuries, these populations mixed, contributing substantially to the ancestry of today’s Japanese population.
Hokkaido, however, followed a somewhat different path. Rice agriculture did not initially replace hunting, fishing and gathering there in the same way it did farther south. Cultures descended from the Jōmon developed while also trading and interacting with communities around the Sea of Okhotsk and with people farther south in Honshu. From those long and complex interactions emerged the culture we now recognize as Ainu.
The Ainu lived in villages, or kotan, often situated along rivers where fishing, hunting and trade were central to daily life. In the Kushiro region, Ainu communities lived along the Kushiro River and throughout the surrounding wetlands.
The museum’s exhibits explore traditional Ainu hunting and gathering, clothing, food, beliefs, ceremonial objects, transportation and oral traditions. Among the objects associated with Ainu life are distinctive boats built for river and coastal travel, reminders of just how important the waterways of eastern Hokkaido were to transportation and survival.
For much of modern Japanese history, however, Ainu culture was not celebrated.
During Japan’s modernization in the 19th and 20th centuries, government policy emphasized assimilation. Traditional Ainu practices were suppressed or discouraged, land was taken over for Japanese settlement, and the Ainu language declined dramatically.
Public attitudes and official policy began to change gradually, particularly late in the 20th century.
A major step came with the 1997 Ainu Culture Promotion Act, which marked a shift toward preserving and promoting Ainu culture. In 2008, Japan’s Diet formally recognized the Ainu as an Indigenous people. Then, in 2019, a new law gave that recognition statutory force and expanded efforts to support Ainu culture and communities.
Today there is much greater public interest in Ainu history, language, art and traditions, though that recognition is relatively recent compared with the many centuries of Ainu history in Hokkaido.
All of this history came during what was otherwise a very contemporary Japanese walking experience — including our inevitable stop at 7-Eleven.
Anyone whose idea of 7-Eleven comes from the United States is in for a surprise.
In Japan, the ubiquitous konbini is part convenience store, part miniature supermarket, part café and part neighborhood service center. There are remarkably good sandwiches, rice balls, noodles, salads, prepared meals, desserts and coffee, along with ATMs, parcel services, bill payment, ticketing, photocopying and printing.
Japanese convenience stores also benefit from extraordinarily efficient distribution systems. Fresh food is delivered frequently, allowing stores to remain compact while still offering an enormous range of prepared meals and everyday necessities.
The Japanese version of 7-Eleven became so successful that the relationship eventually reversed: the Japanese company that developed the country’s 7-Eleven operation ultimately acquired control of the American business.
What began as an American convenience-store concept was transformed in Japan into something distinctly Japanese.
So our first morning back in Japan after 26 years managed to encompass quite a lot: a sunny waterfront, two swimming deer, thousands of years of Jōmon and Ainu history, a walk across Kushiro, and a reminder that even a trip to 7-Eleven can tell you something about the country you’ve just arrived in.
After our walk and museum visit, we took the short shuttle ride back to Westerdam where alongside the ship had sprung up a small village of local food trucks and trinket vendors. All in all a pleasant day for our first stop back in Nippon.