A hollow Hokkaido: a historic village is a microcosm for northern woes.
With a climate and topography closer to that of Topeka than Tokyo, Hokkaido residents are fond of comparing themselves to Americans, blessed with an un-Japanese "frontier spirit" inherited from hardy ancestors who came north in the late 19th century to fish, farm, log and dig coal.
Hokkaido's special treatment is widely seen as the root of its current predicament, having turned the island of six million from pioneering Daniel Boones into passive welfare queens.
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