Tomakomai 苫小牧市

The name comes from Ainu. The city explains it as follows. The land along the Tomakomai River was called Makomai (マコマイ), "the river that goes deep into the mountains". Near a marsh by the old site of Tarumaezan Shrine, the Ainu word to (marsh) was added, giving To-makomai (ト・マコマイ)⁶². A second theory, which Wikipedia flags as needing verification, takes the name from tu-makomai, the old channel and mouth of the Makomai River, about 300 m south of today's city hospital².

• Earliest records: a Genroku-era (c. 1700) register wrote the name as "Makomae" (まこまへ). The explorer Matsuura Takeshirō recorded "Tofumakomafu" (トフマコマフ) in his first Ezo diary. In 1869 the Kōchi domain, which then administered the area, wrote it in katakana as "Tomakomai"².
• From 苫細 to 苫小牧: in February 1873 the name was written in kanji as 苫細 (Tomakosai). Later that year the Kaitakushi's Tokyo office changed it to 苫小牧, and Dajōkan proclamation No. 364 of 8 November 1873 made it official. The local office did not learn of the change until the following year. The post office adopted the new name on 20 August 1874².
• Why 牧 ("pasture")? Nobody knows for certain. The city lists three theories²⁰.
  • The spelling copied an old form of Shimamaki, once written 島小牧 (Shimakomaki).
  • An early Meiji horse ranch was called 苫細牧.
  • A Kaitakushi official, Komaki Masanari (小牧昌業), wrote the character from his own surname, by mistake or on purpose.

• Prehistory: the Shizukawa site (静川遺跡) on the Atsuma Plateau is a Jōmon settlement ringed by a V-shaped moat 139 m long, dated to the very end of the Jōmon period. Moated Jōmon settlements have not been found anywhere else in Japan. A 1982 dig recovered some 180,000 pottery, stone-tool and ornament finds, spanning the Initial Jōmon to the Epi-Jōmon, and the site was made a national Historic Site on 8 January 1987²¹.
• Ainu era: the Yufutsu River was an Ainu route inland toward Chitose and Ishikari. A dugout canoe said to be about 600 years old was excavated from it, and Ainu settlement sites have yielded coins and lacquerware from trade with the Japanese²². Mt. Tarumae erupted on a very large scale (VEI 5) in 1667 and 1739. Some researchers link the ashfall of this period to the 1669 Ainu uprising known as Shakushain's War¹⁷.
• Edo-period contact: Yufutsu appears in records from 1670 as "Ifutsu"²². In 1799 the shogunate set up a trading post (勇払会所) there¹. In 1800 the Hachiōji Sennin Dōshin (八王子千人同心), samurai farmer-guards from Musashi Province (now Tokyo), were sent to guard and farm Ezo. About 100 young men came under Hara Hansaemon. Half went to Shiranuka, while Hara Shinsuke's party settled at Yufutsu. Sixteen men died within two years, and the land was abandoned after four years²³. Their graves at Yufutsu are a city-designated historic site²².
• Meiji settlement: from 1870 to 1872 the Kōchi (Tosa) domain governed the area and sent more than 70 people to Yufutsu and Chitose¹². In 1873 the Sapporo Hondō, Japan's first carriage road, was routed through Tomakosai rather than Yufutsu. The Kaitakushi office moved with it and Yufutsu declined²². Also in 1873, the American engineer James R. Wasson laid out the Yufutsu survey baseline (14.86 km), the starting point of Hokkaido's triangulation survey. Its base marker became a Hokkaido Historic Site in 1962²². Emperor Meiji rested at the spring now called Gozensui (御前水) on 3 September 1881⁹. The railway (today's Muroran Main Line) reached the town in 1892¹.
• Paper town: Oji Paper picked Tomakomai for its mill for three reasons: water from Lake Shikotsu and the Chitose River for hydroelectric power, easy access to timber, and cheap land. The mill opened in 1910¹³. On 1 May 1921 the "Koinobori Fire" burned a third of the town center. It was named after the carp streamers that carried the flames²⁴, and 1,007 homes were lost². The poet Miyazawa Kenji passed through in 1924 while leading a school trip and wrote the poem "Ushi" (牛, "Cow") about the town⁹.
• Port and industrial boom: work on the port began in 1951, and the first ship entered in 1963¹. Car ferries followed in 1972. Idemitsu's Hokkaido refinery opened in 1973, and the East Port opened in 1980, the year the population reached 150,000¹². Toyota Motor Hokkaido was founded in 1991 and its plant was completed in 1993²⁵.
• Disasters:
  • 2003 Tokachi-oki earthquake: fires broke out in fuel tanks at the Idemitsu refinery. It was the first full-surface tank fire in Japan².
  • 2018 Hokkaido Eastern Iburi earthquake: shindo 5+ was recorded at Asahi-machi. Liquefaction damaged the port's container terminal, and the island-wide blackout halted Toyota's plant²⁶.
• Recent:
  • 2016–2019: the national CCS demonstration injected 300,000 tonnes of CO₂ into rock formations more than 1,000 m below ground. The target was reached on 22 November 2019²⁷.
  • 2020: Hokkaido's first local-design number plate, "Tomakomai", was introduced, and the Tomakomai-Chūō expressway interchange opened².
  • End of March 2026: the Oji Nepia Tomakomai plant closed. About 70% of its 63 employees (43 people) stayed in local jobs²⁸.

Tomakomai lies on the Pacific coast about 50 km south of Sapporo²⁹. Its built-up area runs east to west along the shore². Behind it, the ground rises northwest toward the Shikotsu caldera rim.

• Mountains:
  • Mt. Tarumae (樽前山, 1,041 m), on the border with Chitose. It is an active triple volcano with a lava dome, in Shikotsu-Toya National Park (支笏洞爺国立公園)². The dome formed during the eruption of 17–19 April 1909 and is a Hokkaido Natural Monument. It stands about 120 m above the crater floor, is about 450 m across, and is closed to climbers¹⁷.
  • Lower peaks include Mt. Morappu (モラップ山, 506.6 m)².
• Rivers and wetlands: the main rivers include the Betsubetsu, Nishitappu, Tomakomai, Yufutsu, Bibi and Abira².
  • Lake Utonai is a freshwater lake of 275 ha with a 9 km shoreline and an average depth of 0.6 m. It is fed by clear streams such as the Bibi River and the Tokisatamappu¹⁵.
  • About 510 ha around the lake became a national wildlife protection area in 1982. The lake was listed under the Ramsar Convention in 1991 and joined the East Asian–Australasian Flyway Partnership in 2006¹⁵.
  • The wetland has been slowly drying out. The average water level fell from 2.3 m in the 1960s to 1.6 m in 1977, and a weir built in 1998 now holds it at about 2 m³⁰.
• Gorges and ponds:
  • Tarumae Garō (樽前ガロー) is a narrow gorge whose rock walls are covered with about 100 species of moss. It became a city nature conservation area in 1979⁹.
  • The ponds of Nishiki-Ōnuma Park sit at the tip of the Tarumae foothills⁹.
• Climate: humid continental (Dfb)². The 1991–2020 normals for the Tomakomai weather station are as follows³¹.
  • Annual mean temperature 7.9 °C. January averages −3.6 °C and August 20.4 °C.
  • Precipitation 1,239.2 mm and sunshine 1,711.5 hours a year.
  • Snowfall 145 cm a year, with an average peak snow depth of 31 cm.
  • Sea fog is common in summer, with about 10 foggy days in July.
  • Records: highest 35.5 °C (15 August 2007), lowest −21.3 °C (18 January 1945), deepest snow 77 cm (11 March 1978)³².
  • The city notes that it gets relatively little snow for Hokkaido and that its temperatures through the year are close to those of the summer resort of Karuizawa⁵. Even so, it is legally designated a heavy-snow area².

• Manufacturing hub:
  • In 2020 Tomakomai's factories shipped ¥1.007 trillion of goods, the most of any Hokkaido municipality and well ahead of Sapporo (¥578 billion)⁵.
  • The city's chart labels Tomakomai's share as 24.2%. Measured against the Hokkaido total the same chart gives (¥5.52 trillion), it works out to about 18%⁵.
  • In 2021 the city had 193 manufacturing establishments with 10,977 employees⁵.
  • Across all sectors in 2021 there were 6,856 establishments with 76,995 workers. Wholesale and retail employed 15,068 people, more than any other single industry the city lists, though its combined service-industries group employed 18,509⁵.
• Oji Paper Tomakomai Mill (王子製紙苫小牧工場): the company's core mill has made pulp and paper since 1910 and has eight paper machines. It is Oji's only remaining newsprint mill and supplies about 25% of Japan's newsprint. Wikipedia describes it as the largest single newsprint mill in the world¹³. The mill's 200 m chimney, lit in 1974, is a city landmark¹³.
• Autos and energy:
  • Toyota Motor Hokkaido (トヨタ自動車北海道) was founded on 8 February 1991 and has its headquarters at Yufutsu. It makes automatic transmissions, CVTs, hybrid transaxles and transfer cases, and its sales for the year to March 2026 were ¥226.5 billion²⁵.
  • Idemitsu's refinery opened in 1973².
  • The Tomakomai East (苫東) industrial zone holds one of the world's largest national oil stockpiles in above-ground tanks².
  • Tomakomai was chosen from 115 candidate sites for Japan's CCS (carbon capture and storage) demonstration²⁷.
• Port and logistics:
  • In 2024 the port handled 100,040,848 tonnes of cargo and 14,050 ship calls⁵.
  • Wikipedia reports that it was 4th in Japan for total cargo in 2015 and 1st for domestic cargo².
  • Ferries carried 843,075 passengers in 2024⁵.
• Fisheries:
  • The 2024 catch was 5,259 tonnes worth ¥1.89 billion⁵. Main species: hokki clams 755 t (¥454 million, 24% of the value), walleye pollock 1,491 t, hair crab 24 t and salmon 61 t.
  • The industry is small: 88 fishing businesses and 52 powered boats in 2023⁵.
  • Hokki fishing stops during the May–June spawning season³³.
• Farming and forestry: farming is marginal, with 53 farm households working 922 ha in 2020. Forest covers 33,054 ha⁵.
• Tourism: 2,894,159 visitors in fiscal 2024, of whom 833,764 visited the Michi-no-Eki⁵.
• Population and restructuring:
  • The population has been shrinking since 2015 (see At a glance)³.
  • The closure of Oji Nepia's plant in March 2026 cost 63 jobs²⁸.
  • The port authority is promoting carbon-neutral port projects¹².

In 2026 the city certified 31 businesses' products as official specialties under the brand "Tomanashuran" (とまナシュラン)³⁸.

• Tarumaezan Shrine (樽前山神社), Takaoka 6-49:
  • Enshrines the kami of mountains, trees and moorland. Its main shrine is on the summit of Mt. Tarumae (奥宮).
  • Listed as a beppyō shrine in 1986.
  • Moved to its present hillside site in 1992⁴¹.
• Museums:
  • Tomakomai City Museum of Art and History (苫小牧市美術博物館, "Amyū") covers geology, archaeology including a Shizukawa moat corner, Ainu life, pioneer history and "Skate Town Tomakomai"⁴⁶.
  • The Science Center displays the backup unit of the Soviet/Russian Mir space station (see Sights)⁴⁷.
• Monuments:
  • A monument to Miyazawa Kenji's 1924 visit stands downtown⁹.
  • A statue of the Hachiōji Sennin Dōshin stands in front of the Civic Hall²³.
• Sport as civic culture:
  • Since 1995 the city has named "Sports Masters", local Olympians and athletes who teach residents. It was the first municipality in Japan to do so².
  • Komadai Tomakomai High School won the summer Kōshien baseball championship in 2004 and 2005, the first titles for any Hokkaido school².

Many local place names are Ainu:

• Utonai comes from ut-nay ("rib river"), because the streams feeding the lake looked like ribs off a backbone. The lake itself was called kim-un-to ("mountain lake")³⁰.
• Yufutsu is probably i-put ("its mouth"), the entrance to the inland route to Chitose and Ishikari. The place-name scholar Yamada Hidezō declined to give a firm reading²².
• Tarumae comes from taor-oma-i ("the thing on the high riverbank"). It probably named the Tarumae River first and only later the volcano¹⁷⁹.
• Shūbun, the name of the East Port ferry pier, comes from the Ainu shubun ("Japanese dace")⁴⁸.
• Hokki, the name of the clam, is itself said to come from Ainu³³.

Living traces and collections:

• The City Museum's permanent gallery "Ainu no Kurashi" (Ainu Life) shows Ainu tools and objects⁴⁶.
• An Ainu dugout canoe with its paddles (アイヌ丸木舟および推進具) is a Hokkaido-designated Tangible Cultural Property in the city². A dugout canoe about 600 years old, excavated from the Yufutsu River, is displayed at the museum²².
• A tobacco case and an arrow-poison container from the museum served as models in the manga Golden Kamuy, whose volume 7 is partly set in Tomakomai. They are displayed with a signed illustration by the author, Noda Satoru⁴⁹.
• The Yūfutsu Shiryōkan (勇武津資料館) is modeled on the old trading post. It shows how Ainu and Japanese lived alongside each other in the Edo period⁹.

A word of caution about haskap. Local marketing, including the city's own 2026 specialty pamphlet, often calls it the Ainu "elixir of long life"³⁴. According to Wikipedia, that story was made up by Kobayashi Masatoshi, the third-generation head of the family behind Mitsuboshi, to explain the unfamiliar berry when he sold Yoitomake at Mitsukoshi in Tokyo¹⁸. For more on Ainu culture in the area, see the entry for neighboring Shiraoi.

• Hachiōji, Tokyo: sister city since 10 August 1973. The link comes from the Hachiōji Sennin Dōshin settlers of 1800⁶¹²³.
• Napier, New Zealand: sister city since 22 April 1980. The ports were paired as sister ports in 1978⁶¹².
• Nikkō, Tochigi: sister city since 16 April 1982, renewed on 1 October 2006 after Nikkō's merger. With Hachiōji it forms a rare three-way sister-city relationship⁶¹.
• Qinhuangdao, Hebei, China: international friendship city since 1 September 1998. The two ports have been friendship ports since 1985⁶¹².

• Koki Niwa (丹羽孝希), table tennis player, born in Tomakomai. Olympic team silver medal (Rio 2016) and bronze medal (Tokyo 2020)⁶².
• SHOKICHI (EXILE SHOKICHI), singer with EXILE, born in Tomakomai. He went to Tomakomai Technical High School⁶³.
• Keiichi Suzuki (鈴木惠一), speed skater. He competed at three Winter Olympics and won silver at the 1970 World Sprint Championships².
• Akira Suzuki (鈴木章), chemist and 2010 Nobel laureate. He graduated from Tomakomai East High School².
• Masahiro Tanaka (田中将大), baseball pitcher. He played for Komazawa University Tomakomai High School².
• Seishū Hase (馳星周), novelist. He graduated from Tomakomai East High School².