Around Biei the land does something you rarely see in Japan: it opens up. Instead of tight valleys and forested slopes, there are long, soft hills covered in fields, each a different colour depending on the crop, wheat, potatoes, buckwheat, beans, sugar beet, so that from any rise the landscape looks like a quilt laid over a sleeping body. That is the Patchwork Road, a loose network of farm lanes north and west of Biei town, with Asahikawa a little over twenty kilometres away and the Tokachi volcanoes standing to the south-east.
The scenery became famous partly through photography. A photographer who settled in Biei in the 1970s and 1980s shot these hills in every season, and his pictures turned a farming district into a pilgrimage. Single trees on the ridgelines became celebrities in their own right, appearing in advertisements, and some have names such as the Ken and Mary tree or the Seven Stars tree, along with a pair called the parent-and-child trees. Local farmers have been patient with the crowds, but please do not walk into the fields: these are working farms, and trampling crops, or carrying soil on your boots from one field to another, causes real damage.
The riding is relaxed rather than technical. The lanes rise and fall gently, often narrow, sometimes without a centre line, and the corners are wide and easy. Watch out for tractors, tour buses stopping suddenly, and cars pulled half onto the verge for a photo. The best season is midsummer, when the fields are at their most colourful and the weather is dry and mild, but late spring has green fields and snow still on the volcanoes, and early autumn brings golden wheat stubble.
Biei town has fuel, food and a station, and Asahikawa, Hokkaido's second city, has everything else, including a famous zoo and a soy-based style of ramen. Hokkaido summers are short and the evenings cool, so carry a layer, and remember that wildlife, including deer and occasionally foxes, use the farm roads at dusk. It is the gentlest checkpoint on the ride, a place to slow down and look.