Shimizu 清水町

• Shimizu (清水), "clear water", is a Japanese translation of the Ainu river name Pekerebetsu (ペケレベツ). The town explains it as "a bright, clear river"⁴. The Hokkaido Government's Ainu place-name list gives peker-pet, "clear river" (from (pe)peker-pet, "(water-)clear river"). It rates this reading A, its most certain level, following Yamada Hidezō. It also quotes Matsuura Takeshirō, who explained the name as "bright water", because the river's water was bright¹⁶.
• How the name spread: the Pekerebetsu relay station (駅逓, 1899) was renamed Shimizu relay station in 1901⁵. The railway station opened as Shimizu in 1907⁵. The village, however, was called Hitomai, and the mismatch caused administrative and business problems. So on 25 September 1927 the village took the name Shimizu⁴.
• Hitomai (人舞), the earlier village name, survives as a district name. It is traced to nitu-oma-p, "the river where driftwood lies". An 1896 map wrote it as Nitomap. The list rates this reading C, the least certain level¹⁷.
• Mikage (御影): the station first opened in 1907 as Sanenkoro (佐念頃). Yamada read this as san-enkor, "a protruding nose", meaning a spur of hill jutting toward the Tokachi River. After Mikage Village was founded, the station was renamed Mikage after the granite (御影石, mikage-ishi) produced in the area¹⁸.
• "Tokachi Shimizu": Shimizu Station was renamed Tokachi-Shimizu in 1934 at the request of the Ministry of Railways⁵. The reason was confusion with Shimizu in Shizuoka¹. In 2025 the town planned to rename itself Tokachi-Shimizu-chō (十勝清水町) from 1 October 2026¹⁹. On 11 June 2026, however, the town council rejected an ordinance for a referendum on the change. The vote was tied 6–6 and decided by the chair, which makes a name change unlikely for now²⁰.

• Ainu era: in 1858 the explorer Matsuura Takeshirō stayed at Nitomaf (today's Hitomai) and met the local Ainu while surveying Ezo's mountains and rivers⁵. The town lists his lodging site as one of its historic sites¹.
• 1898 – Shibusawa's farm: the Kumaushi Farm (熊牛農場) of Shibusawa Eiichi's Tokachi Kaikon Gōshi Kaisha (十勝開墾合資会社) took in 26 households (99 people) from the Echizen region (Fukui). Six households of a Sanuki (Kagawa) group settled the Kami-Memuro and Pekerebetsu plains⁵.
• 1899–1903 – Early settlement: Shionoya Tatsuzō's ranch on the Kami-Habaobi plain began keeping dairy cows in 1901, and this is regarded as the birthplace of the town's dairy farming. In 1901, 20 households from Ōmatsuzawa Village in Miyagi joined the Kumaushi Farm⁵.
• 1907–1912: the railway between Asahikawa and Kushiro opened in 1907, with Shimizu and Sanenkoro stations. Shibusawa visited the farm in 1908 and stayed three nights. Taishō Shrine (大勝神社) in Kumaushi was built in 1912 with his support⁵.
• 1915–1933: Hitomai became a separate village in 1915, and Mikage Village split from Memuro Village in 1921. Nippon Beet Sugar opened a Shimizu sugar mill in 1922. In 1923 a German farmer, Friedrich Koch, settled at Shimo-Sahoro to teach farming. In 1931 and 1933 tenants on the Biman and Kumaushi farms won the transfer of their farmland from the owners⁵.
• 1936–1962: Shimizu became a town in 1936 and absorbed Mikage in 1956. In 1958 the Kami-Memuro district (109 households, 667 people) moved to Memuro. A Takegishi Livestock plant (now Prima Ham) opened in 1957 and the Hokuren Shimizu sugar mill in 1962⁵.
• 1965–1995 – Roads: the Nissho road (now Route 274) opened in 1965. The Dōtō Expressway opened from Tokachi-Shimizu IC to Ikeda IC in 1995, and in 2011 it gave a through route to Sapporo⁵.
• 2000s – Money troubles: from 2002 the town ran repeated emergency programmes to cut staff costs and avoid financial collapse⁵.
• 2016 – Typhoons: four typhoons flooded the Pekerebetsu and other rivers. A JR bridge pier was washed away, a Route 38 bridge was destroyed, and sections of the Nissho Pass road collapsed. Two people went missing. The JR Sekishō Line was cut for four months and Nissho Pass for a year and two months⁵. The pass reopened on 28 October 2017¹⁵. In December 2016 Hokkaido's first outbreak of highly pathogenic bird flu in poultry was found at a farm in the town, and more than 280,000 birds were culled¹.
• 2018–2019: Habaobi Station closed in 2018. The blackout after the 2018 Hokkaido Eastern Iburi earthquake forced dairy plants to dump raw milk. In 2019 the NHK morning drama Natsuzora, partly filmed in Shimizu, went on air⁵.
• 2020s: the town declared a "Zero Carbon Tokachi Shimizu" goal in 2021. It held its 120th-anniversary ceremony in 2022, attended by the mayor of Fukaya, Shibusawa's birthplace in Saitama. In 2024 the mountains in the west of the town became part of the new Hidaka-sanmyaku Erimo Tokachi National Park⁵¹. The name-change plan stalled in June 2026²⁰.

• Landforms: the town lies in the inland west of the Tokachi Plain. The flat farmland in the east rises westward into the Hidaka Mountains¹. Forest covers 45% of the land and fields 36%⁴.
• Mountains: Memuro-dake (芽室岳, 1,753 m), Takao-yama (高尾山, 1,576 m), Pekerebetsu-dake (ペケレベツ岳, 1,532 m), Kuyama-dake (久山岳, 1,412 m), Kenzan (剣山, 1,205 m) and Kumami-yama (熊見山, 1,175 m)⁴. The western mountains form the northern end of Hidaka-sanmyaku Erimo Tokachi National Park¹.
• Rivers: the Tokachi and Sahoro rivers, and the Kuyama, Memuro, Kobayashi and Pekerebetsu rivers that flow down from the Hidaka range¹.
• Climate: the town uses normals from the Shintoku weather station, just to the north. They give an annual mean of 6.9 °C, from −6.2 °C in January to 19.8 °C in August, and 1,162.2 mm of precipitation a year⁴. At Shintoku the average daily low in January is −11.1 °C. Snowfall totals 517 cm a season, with an average deepest snow of 76 cm (1991–2020 normals)²¹. Shintoku's records are 37.3 °C (24 July 2025), −28.3 °C (17 February 1978) and 119 cm of snow on the ground (4 March 2001)²².

• Farming: 316 farm businesses work 12,686 ha (Census of Agriculture). Nearly three-quarters of them farm 20–100 ha⁷. The main crops in 2026 by planted area are wheat (3,145 ha), sugar beet (1,127 ha), potatoes (776 ha) and soybeans (750 ha). Smaller crops include sweet corn (88 ha), Chinese cabbage (20 ha), garlic (15 ha) and asparagus (12 ha)⁷.
• Livestock: 29,199 dairy cattle, 36,079 beef cattle, 6,398 pigs and 377,423 laying hens (2026). The town's raw-milk output handled by the JA was 154,567 t in 2025⁷.
• Garlic: 19 farms began test plantings in 2009. The town declared itself a garlic-producing area in 2019, and from 2021 about 17 farms have grown roughly 20 ha⁵. JA Tokachi Shimizu turns part of the crop into aged black garlic²³.
• Food processing: the town has a long history of food processing. Industry dates back to Nippon Beet Sugar's Shimizu sugar mill (1922), which passed to Meiji Seitō in 1923. Nippon Beet Sugar's post-war Shimizu plant (1946) gave up sugar, turned to yeast in 1949 and later added paper pots for seedlings (1962) and supplement ingredients (2004). The Takegishi Livestock (now Prima Ham) plant followed in 1957 and the Hokuren Shimizu sugar mill in 1962⁵. In 2020 the 18 manufacturing sites with four or more workers employed 479 people and shipped goods worth about ¥22.6 billion²⁴. Local firms include the Torisei chicken-restaurant chain, Tokachi Slow Food (gyutoro) and Tamura Seimen noodles¹.
• Population: the population fell from 9,961 (2010 Census) to 9,094 (2020 Census). In 2020, 38.4% of residents were 65 or older and 10.3% were under 15². The resident register shows a further fall to 8,493 by August 2026³.
• Furusato nozei: in FY2025 the town received ¥395.4 million from 23,454 donations. The total since FY2008 is ¥2.2 billion²⁵.

• The Ninth: after the first performance in 1980¹¹, residents' concerts followed every five years to 2010, and then in 2018, 2022 and 2025. The 2025 concert marked 200 years since the symphony's premiere⁵.
• Ice hockey: the Shimizu Town Ice Arena opened in 1992⁵. It is home to the women's team Mikage Gretz (御影グレッズ), which plays in Japan's women's ice hockey league³⁹.
• Shrines, temples and historic sites: Shimizu Shrine (1917) and Mikage (formerly Sanenkoro) Shrine (1909). The town's historic-site postcards show Taishō Shrine, Seienzan Jukō-ji temple and the Tokachi Kaikon company's farm barn (now the Shibuya Farm)⁵, all in Kumaushi, the old Shibusawa farm district¹. The town has chosen six historic sites. Four of them are on private land, so ask the board of education before visiting¹.
• Museums: the town library and local history museum opened in 1990⁵.
• On screen: besides Natsuzora, Japanese Wikipedia lists the town as a setting or filming location for Silver Spoon (manga, anime and live-action film) and the film Neet Neet Neet (ニート・ニート・ニート)¹.

Shimizu, Hitomai, Mikage's old name Sanenkoro and the Memuro River are all Ainu place names (see Name origin)¹⁶¹⁷¹⁸. The tourism association gives Kenzan's Ainu name as "Eene-en-nupuri" (pointed, jutting mountain)⁴⁰, and Memuro-dake's name comes from mem-oro-pet, "a river coming from a spring pond"⁴¹. The best-documented event is Matsuura Takeshirō's stay at Nitomaf in 1858, when he met the local Ainu⁵. Beyond place names and this record, the town's pages say little about Ainu history, and no Ainu cultural facility was found in town.

• Nationwide Shimizu towns: in 1979 Shimizu joined a sister-town pact among Japan's towns named Shimizu. The pact ended in March 2006, although economic and cultural exchange continues⁵. Japanese Wikipedia says the pact lapsed in 2005¹.
• Fukaya: no formal sister-city agreement was found, but the town has ties with Fukaya (Saitama), Shibusawa's birthplace. Its mayor attended the 2022 anniversary⁵.

• Shibusawa Eiichi (渋沢栄一): industrialist whose Tokachi Kaikon company founded the Kumaushi Farm in 1898. He visited in 1908⁵.
• Friedrich Koch: German farmer who settled at Shimo-Sahoro in 1923 to teach farming. His house is one of the town's historic sites⁵¹.
• Oki Miho (沖美穂): former road cyclist, born in Shimizu¹.