Hokkaido does not usually come to mind when people talk about ancient Japan, yet the shell heaps around Uchiura Bay are some of the oldest signs of settled life in the archipelago. Kitakogane sits on the edge of the bay near Date, roughly halfway between Muroran and the volcanic country around Lake Toya. The Jomon people who lived here gathered shellfish, hunted deer and fished, and they threw the shells onto the same pile for centuries, which is why a modern visitor can read a kitchen midden like a diary. It belongs to the group of northern Jomon sites that UNESCO listed in 2021.
What survives is subtle. The shell mound is a gentle mound, not a monument, and there is a small museum nearby that explains what the shells, stone tools and burial remains tell us. Early Jomon people were not nomads in the way the textbooks used to say; they lived in villages and kept their dead in ordered places, and some of the oldest evidence in Hokkaido comes from sites like this one. Visit with the right expectations and it becomes moving rather than disappointing: this is a place where the Pacific has been feeding people for several thousand years.
The coast road along Route 37 is easy and pleasant riding, with long, gentle bends along the water and views across Funka Bay toward the Shiribeshi mountains when the weather behaves. Fog rolls in from the sea in early summer and can turn a bright morning into a grey one in minutes, so wear something warm. The bay is also a working fishery, and the scallops here are famous, so a seafood lunch in Date or Muroran is a reasonable priority. Muroran, to the east, is a steel and port city with a surprisingly dramatic coastline, including the Chikyu-misaki headland, which is worth a detour.
The volcanic backdrop is hard to miss. Mount Usu erupted in 2000 and again in the 1970s, and the lava domes and steaming scars are still visible around Lake Toya. Date has fuel and shops in plenty. Winters are long and snowy, so this is a ride for June through October.