Japan's lavender heartland and the patchwork hills of Hokkaido — the July lavender fields of Furano, the Blue Pond at Shirogane, and the color-saturated rolling farm landscape that became Hokkaido's most reproduced image
Furano and Biei are two adjacent towns in the Kamikawa Subprefecture of central Hokkaido, 200km northeast of Sapporo on the Furano Line railway (2 hours from Asahikawa) — the area is Japan's most famous summer color landscape, combining Furano's lavender (the town has grown lavender commercially since the 1960s, when French lavender farming techniques were introduced; the fields of Farm Tomita, the original and most famous lavender farm, covering 25 hectares with the Tokachi mountain range as a backdrop, are the source of the image that has become synonymous with Hokkaido summer) with the rol…
The Furano Valley was settled primarily in the Meiji period (1868-1912) as part of the systematic Japanese colonization of Hokkaido (the northernmost main island, previously inhabited by the Ainu people whose forested island had been progressively annexed from the south by the Tokugawa shogunate from the 17th century). The Furano agricultural character (mixed farming of wheat, sugar beet, potato, corn, and flower crops) was shaped by the Hokkaido Development Commission's incentive programs for Japanese settlers from the main islands. The lavender industry specifically began in the 1950s when…