Kyogoku 京極町

• Not an Ainu name: Kyōgoku (京極) is a Japanese family name. Viscount Kyōgoku Takanori (京極高徳, 1858–1928) was the adopted heir of his uncle Kyōgoku Akiyuki (京極朗徹), lord of the Marugame domain in Sanuki (now Kagawa Prefecture). He became a viscount in 1884 and sat in the House of Peers from 1890 until his death.²⁴ In 1897 he leased about 800 ha of unopened land near the Wakkatasappu River (ワッカタサップ川), in what was then Kutchan Village, and founded the Kyōgoku Farm.²⁵⁴
• From Higashi-Kutchan to Kyōgoku: The settlement grew up around the farm and was called Higashi-Kutchan ("East Kutchan"). When it became its own village in 1910 it took that name.⁴ In 1919 the railway put its station on farm land and named it Kyōgoku Station. The Kyōgoku family broke up the farm in 1938 and turned the land over to its tenant farmers. The village was renamed Kyōgoku in 1940. The renaming kept the family's name alive, and it also ended the confusion between the village name and its station.³⁴ The tourism association says the farmers chose the name to thank the family for the land.²⁵
• The former name's Ainu root: "Kutchan" comes from Ainu. Hokkaido's Ainu place-name list gives several readings and says the origin is disputed. One, from the Kutchan town profile, is kut-san-i, "where it flows out through a tube-like place". Others are kut-sam-un-pet, "the river beside the cliff", and kutu-sani, "muddy river". See Kutchan.²⁶

• Ainu era: The Ainu called the Shiribetsu River Shiri-pet and relied on its fish. In the late Edo period the explorer Matsuura Takeshirō travelled the area several times with Ainu help and recorded the river as their fishing grounds.²⁵ No archaeological sites within the town were found in the sources consulted.
• 1895–1897: A cattle-ranch attempt in 1895 failed. In 1897 Kyōgoku Takanori began clearing the farm with Kodama Tadahiro as manager.²⁵⁹ The first workers were experienced settlers brought in from Tōya Village.⁵
• Group settlement and independence: Tenant farmers came from Ishikawa Prefecture in 1898 (16 households) and from Ishikawa and Toyama in 1899 and 1900. A Yamanashi group of 207 households arrived in 1908 and a Yamagata group in 1909.⁹ Groups from Gunma followed in 1911–1912.²⁵ The town plan also lists settlers from Tokushima, Fukushima, Miyagi and Gifu.⁵ The road from Kutchan, the forerunner of National Route 276, opened in 1905. In 1910 Higashi-Kutchan Village became independent, with 6,783 people.⁹
• Mining and railway boom (1916–1920s): The Pepenai (ペーペナイ) iron deposit was found in 1916. The Pepenai power station lit the town in 1917.⁹ Other accounts date the limonite bed at Wakikata to 1898. From 1918 the mine supplied the Mitsui-backed steel works at Muroran, and the railway was built mainly to carry its ore.²² The Kyōgoku Light Railway (Kutchan–Kyōgoku) opened on 15 November 1919 and the Wakikata branch on 15 July 1920. The population reached its peak of 10,582 at the end of 1920. The mine shut during the slump after World War I in 1921 and reopened in 1925.⁹²²
• Hard years (1928–1945): The private Iburi Railway reached Kimobetsu in 1928. The whole line to Date opened in 1941, and it was nationalized as the JNR Iburi Line in 1944.⁹²² Cold summers ruined harvests again and again in the late 1920s and 1930s. A flood and Yōtei mudflow on 20 August 1930 killed one person in Kawanishi.⁹ The Sumitomo gold mine worked from 1933 to 1936.⁹ The farm was turned over to its tenants in 1938. Nittetsu Mining took over the iron mine in 1939 and renamed it the Kutchan Mine.⁹
• Postwar: Evacuees from Tokyo settled in Kawanishi in 1945.⁹ A fire in the town center burned 40 houses on 2 May 1959.⁹ Kyōgoku became a town on 1 May 1962. The Kutchan Mine closed on 24 October 1969 after 50 years, and the Wakikata branch line closed in 1970. Thousands of people left the town.⁹²⁵ When rice production was cut back, farmers moved from paddies to upland crops, especially Danshaku potatoes.²⁵
• The spring becomes the town's brand (1985–2008): The spring was named one of the 100 Famous Waters in 1985. The JNR Iburi Line closed on 31 October 1986 and Dōnan Bus took over the route.⁹ The first Shakkoi Festival was held in 1990.⁹ In 1996 the town was named one of the "100 Water Villages" (水の郷百選), Kyōgoku Onsen opened and the town marked its centenary.⁹ The spring became a Hokkaido Heritage in 2001, and Fukidashi Park won the grand prize of the national Tezukuri Kyōdo Award (手づくり郷土賞) in 2005.⁹² The roadside station opened in 2007. In 2008 Kyōgoku joined The Most Beautiful Villages in Japan (「日本で最も美しい村」連合).⁹
• Power station era: Work on the Kyōgoku Power Station began in 2002. Unit 1 started in October 2014 and unit 2 in November 2015.⁹²¹ The construction workforce briefly pushed the population up. It began falling again after unit 2 was finished.⁵ A water-resources conservation ordinance was passed in 2013.²⁵
• Recent: The town marked 120 years in 2016 and signed the Marugame agreement that October.⁹ Minami-Kyōgoku Elementary School closed in 2017.⁹ In 2026 Kyōgoku Onsen closed for a long renovation.²⁷ The town also hired a firm to study how much groundwater is available and whether it could be used, including by industry.²⁸

• Setting: Most of the town is mountains and hills. The flat land is limited to the valley between the Shiribetsu and Wakkatasappu rivers and the Pepenai River basin. The town office stands at about 228 m, and most farmland lies at 250–400 m.⁵³ The soils come from volcanic deposits and are mostly strongly acidic.⁵
• Mountains: Mt. Yōtei rises on the southwest, and its summit is shared by Kyōgoku, Kimobetsu, Makkari, Niseko and Kutchan.⁵ About 7,000 ha around the summit lies inside a national park.¹⁵ Alpine plants grow above about 1,700 m (the tourism association counts 80 species), and the mountain is said to have more than 130 bird species.¹⁶ Mt. Yōtei's alpine plant zone (後方羊蹄山の高山植物帯) is a national natural monument.⁴ The Muine range forms the eastern border with Sapporo.⁵ On that side are Mt. Muine (無意根山, 1,464 m), Nakadake (1,387.8 m) and Kimobetsu-dake (1,176.9 m).²⁹ The whole boundary with Sapporo is forest, and no road crosses it.⁴
• Rivers: The Shiribetsu River (尻別川) flows through town on its way to the Sea of Japan. The tourism association gives its length as 125.7 km. It is home to the rare Sakhalin taimen (イトウ) as well as yamame and white-spotted char.¹⁶ Among Japan's class-A rivers it was rated the clearest seven times between 1999 and 2006.³⁰ Water from the Fukidashi spring drains into it.¹⁶ Kyōgoku Dam on the upper Pepenai River is the lower reservoir of the pumped-storage plant.²¹ Futaba Dam (双葉ダム) is an irrigation dam built under a national land-improvement project in fiscal 1989.³¹
• Climate: The town plan describes an inland climate with warm summers, big differences between day and night temperatures and some of the heaviest snow in Hokkaido. Snow stays on the ground from late November until late April or early May.⁵ JMA has no station in Kyōgoku, so figures from the observatory in neighboring Kutchan (about 15 km by road) give a guide.³²³³ Kutchan's 1991–2020 normals are a mean of −5.4 °C in January and 20.6 °C in August, 1,532 mm of precipitation a year, and 921 cm of total snowfall with an average deepest snow of 183 cm.³⁴ Its records are 34.6 °C (23 August 2023), −35.7 °C (27 January 1945) and 312 cm of lying snow (25 March 1970).³⁵

• Agriculture: Farming is mostly large-scale upland cropping. Kyōgoku has about 2,480 ha of farmland, of which only 34 ha is paddy. In 2020 it had 82 farm businesses, and 49 of the town's farms worked 20 ha or more. Shiribeshi's 2025 data book gives these municipal crop figures for 2023, the latest year in its tables:¹⁸

• Farm output: The same book puts the town's 2022 farm output at about ¥2.64 billion. Potatoes brought in about ¥720 million and vegetables about ¥650 million.¹⁸ Kyōgoku is a designated production area for potatoes (since 1974), autumn carrots (since 1989), summer daikon (since 1999) and summer–autumn tomatoes (since 2003).¹⁸ A ceremony in January 1991 marked carrot sales reaching ¥300 million.⁹
• Hydropower: The Kyōgoku Power Station uses a total drop of about 400 m. Water flows between a pool-type upper reservoir on a plateau in the north of the town and Kyōgoku Dam. It has two 200 MW units running (from 2014 and 2015), and a third is planned for fiscal 2031.²¹²⁰ Building it raised the share of people working in construction and other secondary industry above 30% in 2010. That share fell below 20% after the work ended.⁵
• Water and food businesses: The spring supplies drinking water, industrial water and bottled mineral water.³⁶³⁷ Local companies include Kyōgoku Seihyō (京極製氷, ice) and Pioneer Foods (パイオニアフーズ, part of the Marudai Foods group).⁴ The tourism association says the local fries and croquettes are made with the spring water.¹⁷
• Tourism: Hokkaido counted 716,100 tourist visits to Kyōgoku in fiscal 2025, up 6.6%. Almost all were day trips, and only about 2,300 visitors stayed overnight. August was the busiest month, with 116,600 visits.³⁸ The tourism association and the town plan give higher figures of 800,000 to 900,000 a year for Fukidashi Park.³⁹⁵
• Population and revitalization: The population peaked at 10,582 in 1920 and had fallen to 3,489 by 1995.⁵ It was 2,941 at the 2020 Census, and about 39% of residents were 65 or older.⁵⁶ Furusato nozei donations reached ¥130 million in fiscal 2022 and were ¥60.6 million (4,663 donations) in fiscal 2025. Much of the money goes to protecting the spring and the environment.⁴⁰

• Shrines and sacred sites: Kyōgoku Hachiman Shrine became the village shrine in 1923.⁹ Fukidashi Park has statues of the Thirty-Three Kannon, set up by a local priest in the early Shōwa era, and a Fudō Myōō statue. The park is known as a sacred site as well as a water source.⁵⁰¹⁴
• Performing arts: Fukidashi Taiko (ふきだし太鼓) drumming was first performed at the Fukidashi Choir Festival in 1993.⁹
• Museums: The Yūgakukan Lifelong Learning Center (湧学館) has a local history corner, a power station corner, a library and a pottery studio.⁵¹⁵²

Little Ainu history specific to Kyōgoku is documented. The tourism association notes that the Ainu fished the Shiribetsu River and helped Matsuura Takeshirō explore it.²⁵ A monument with one of Matsuura's poems was unveiled at the youth center grounds in 1964.⁹ Scholars disagree about the river's name. Uehara read it as si-ri-pet ("very high river"), and Yamada as sir-pet ("mountain river"), which Hokkaido's river bureau also adopts.⁵³³⁰ Several local river names, including Wakkatasappu and Pepenai, sound Ainu. The first part of Wakkatasappu is probably wakka ("drinking water"), a word found in many Hokkaido place names.⁵⁴ The full meanings of these names could not be confirmed (unverified).

• Marugame, Kagawa Prefecture: A parent–child city (親子都市) agreement was signed on 30 October 2016. Marugame was the home domain of the Kyōgoku family, whose viscount founded the town. The two first exchanged goods at each other's product fairs in 1997, and their tourism associations signed a tourism exchange agreement in 2011.¹³²⁵
• International: None found.

• Kyōgoku Takanori (京極高徳, 1858–1928): Viscount, member of the House of Peers and founder of the Kyōgoku Farm, from which the town takes its name.²⁴
• Haga Tsunetarō and Fujiemon (芳賀常太郎・藤衛門): Brothers who started making skis in Higashi-Kutchan Village in 1918, founding what became Haga Ski.⁴ The town's chronology and the tourism association instead name the first ski maker in 1918 as Haga Tōzaemon (芳賀藤左エ門).⁹²⁵
• Satō Akira (佐藤晃): Ski jumper from Kyōgoku who represented Japan at the 1988 Calgary Winter Olympics.⁴⁹
• Tanaka Mina (田中三奈): Luge athlete who won the 1986 Japan Luge Championship and represented Japan at Calgary 1988. The town held send-offs for her and Satō.⁹