How a remote Alaskan town became a hit with Japanese tourists

My Japanese wife was stretched out on a plush black sofa and I was tucked into the other end. In front of us were long windows looking out on a black-and-white landscape of ghostly birch trees, the outline of receding hills, snowdrifts and stars. A group of visitors from India was crashed out on a sofa behind us but everyone else in the room — the owner of the Aurora Borealis Lodge, an elegant, elderly businessman, two fresh-faced students — was Japanese.

Outside, alone on a terrace, was a single figure, stamping his feet in the minus 17 degree darkness and staring out into the silence for three and a half hours.

“Can you believe it?” cried my wife, Hiroko, as we got up to leave at 2am. “This boy” — she pointed to one of the students, unmet till now — “went to the same junior high school as I did! In southern Kyoto.”

I could believe it. Looking for the Northern Lights around Fairbanks, Alaska, is perhaps the best way of meeting adventurers from every corner of Japan. We stumbled on signs in the middle of nowhere written in katakana script. At Chena Hot Springs, a resort 50 miles outside Fairbanks, we found every room featured a 48-page guide in Japanese, much more extensive than the rather desultory English version. Mok Kumagai, the owner of the Aurora Borealis Lodge, told us that in one recent year, 99 per cent of visitors in search of the lights were Japanese.

Just as we were heading out, the parka-swathed hermit from the deck shuffled in, and we found ourselves next to a tiny character with a wispy white beard who looked like a wizard escaped from a fairytale. He, too, was from Tokyo, it transpired, although he’s been in Alaska for 45 years, hunting wolves and bear with native tribes. “How old are you?” I asked, as Japanese protocol dictates.

“Seventy-seven,” replied the sage, in eastern-accented Japanese. Then he looked up to the heavens and said, in English, “Soon I’ll be joining you. Soon I’ll be with you.”

***

I never saw the Northern Lights that evening, despite our 210-minute vigil, but it hardly mattered. The previous day, within hours of arriving in Alaska, my wife and I had gone dog-mushing through the woods, driven snowmobiles through the falling dusk to within 20ft of a moose and her newborn, walked around an extraordinary museum at Chena Hot Springs, complete with life-size depictions of jousting knights on rearing horses, all made of ice. Twice before 10am, we’d soaked in delicious, medicinal hot springs, the cold turning our hair white and icicle-sharp above our toasty bodies. Most of all, though, I got to see the Japanese among whom I’ve lived for 30 years as they look when they’re joyously themselves and unbuttoned amid nature’s miracles. For me one of the great tourist sights in the modern world is the sight of other tourists, in unexpected contexts.

On that first afternoon in Alaska, Hiroko and I found ourselves with Masako Tokida, who’s been working at Chena Hot Springs for eight years in sales and marketing. After Japanese television specials quickened interest in the aurora in the 1990s, she explained, the first charter flight arrived in 2004 and their number quickly multiplied. Soon there were direct charter flights to Fairbanks not just from Tokyo, but from Nagoya, Sapporo, even from Hiroshima. According to the most recent state figures, 40 per cent of foreign tourists to Alaska in autumn or winter come from Japan (Europe as a whole sent only 31 per cent). Surveys found that 100 per cent of those Japanese, some 5,600 people, visited Fairbanks.

“Some say it was the Japanese interest that helped awaken all Alaska to the aurora,” Masako told us. “Previously, no one, not even Americans, was thinking about the lights.” Once hundreds of Japanese started streaming off Boeing 747s into the little town, Fairbanks had a winter tourist industry.

“And I’m guessing that many of your visitors come to make babies?” I offered. I had frequently read that East Asians believe that children conceived under nature’s son et lumière show are blessed with special gifts. Fairbanks, it followed, was a perfect honeymoon location for Japanese. “Oh no,” said Masako, briskly sweeping aside the urban legend. “That was a story put about by the American TV show Northern Exposure. Most Japanese don’t even know about it. They’re just here for the thrill of a lifetime.”

She looked around the room; the only customers visible were 15 Japanese men seated silently around a long table — on corporate retreat, I suspected, and in no mood for revelry.

“Most of our guests are quite elderly,” she says; procreation isn’t the first thing on their minds. “And, given that the Northern Lights are not so predictable” — she paused discreetly — “it might not be an ideal site for a honeymoon.”

It’s perhaps no surprise that a rather uncompromising 9am-to-9pm work ethic creates an explosion of rebels hungry for anything other than high-pressure urban civilisation. Yet even the Japanese I’ve met learning salsa dancing in Havana or opening yoga studios in rural India have nothing on the ones I met in Alaska, itself a place that appeals mostly to hardy individuals who want to live in a world without norms.

***

One brisk morning — the batteries in Hiroko’s phone froze as soon as she pulled it out — we went to see one of the world’s leading experts on the aurora, Syun-Ichi Akasofu, who was waiting for us at the five-storey Syun-Ichi Akasofu Building at the University of Alaska in Fairbanks, where he is director of the International Arctic Research Center.

A shy, tiny man in a grey suit, Professor Akasofu said he had been researching the Northern Lights in Fairbanks since 1958. Initially, he had to persuade Nasa to help him place 50 cameras on top of planes to record, simultaneously, conditions in the skies above Norway, Siberia, Canada and other places where the heavens erupt in swirling colours. In time, he would be summoned by the emperor of Japan to explain the phenomenon, and by the chief executive of Japan Airlines, an enthusiast who accompanied the first charter flight to Fairbanks aimed at aurora-philes.

“The simplest way to describe the aurora is that it’s like a neon sign,” he says. “The basic physics is the same. But if you take the largest power plant in the world, and multiply it by 1,000, you still won’t have as much power as the aurora produces.” He couldn’t explain why his compatriots had grown so transfixed by the light shows in the heavens. But I recalled how Captain Scott had noted that “there is no glittering splendour to dazzle the eye” when the aurora begins to dance, but “rather, the appeal was to the imagination”.

“I think the elusiveness of the Northern Lights adds to the mystique,” said Amy Geiger of Explore Fairbanks, the local tourist board. “It’s almost like cherry blossoms. You have to work to see them, to be patient.”

Nowadays there are also many visitors from Taiwan, South Korea and China, swathed (as we were) in 13 pounds of clothing as they wander around the gleaming wood-and-glass airport in Fairbanks, or bobbing up and down in the hot springs, brandishing selfie sticks. Where else, I thought, can you find nature at its wildest — and more Thai restaurants in town than American ones?

The aurora season officially lasts from August 21 all the way until April 21, and March is said to be the best season for viewing the lights. The days are warmer, the sunlight lasts for 12 hours each day and the clear evenings make for radiant displays. In September you can enjoy the same, together with autumn colours on the tundra.

***

One evening Hiroko and I found ourselves carrying lanterns as we traipsed up a steep slope behind a cabin without running water or electricity, on a remote, deserted hillside outside Fairbanks. In front of us was Makiko Kawauchi, a small woman from Tokyo who now runs a business called Nature Image with her husband Makiei (there is a website but it’s entirely in Japanese). They spent six years building a special aurora-viewing cabin near their house, equipping it with beds so guests can spend an evening alone with the nightly showers of colours.

Apart from us, their one guest this day was a smiling 20-year-old student who’d never been outside Japan until the night before, and had just polished off a huge plate of fresh king crab legs at the Turtle Club in Fairbanks. Two months later, he’d be driving the bullet train from Tokyo to Osaka and back twice each day.

Makiei projected for us some of the breathtaking photos he’d taken — and exhibited back in Japan — of polar bears with their cubs, of whale hunts, of nature’s neon flashing above his cabin. He explained, with full-throated gusto, how rich a life can be when it is stripped of all distraction and lived with elemental intensity.

“When they come here,” he said, “a lot of people say that the great white open is a lot of nothing. But” — he might have been addressing the whole world now — “for those with eyes, it’s a lot of something.” True enough. We’d already seen wolf tracks in the snow, the intricate tracery of hoarfrost on trees, a stillness that somehow shifted every minute. We never did, in fact, catch the northern lights but everything else around us was so beautiful, we barely noticed.

Details

Pico Iyer was a guest of the Alaska Travel Industry Association and Explore Fairbanks. Chena Hot Springs Resort offers double rooms from $210; Aurora Borealis Lodge has doubles from $209

Photographs: Alamy; Mok Kumagai