Four thousand years ago, someone on this hillside in northern Honshu lined up stones in a ring and built another ring around it, and they did it carefully enough that the circles are still there. Komakino is a Jōmon stone circle, from the hunter-gatherer people who lived in Japan long before rice farming, and it is one of the sites in the UNESCO listing of Jōmon prehistoric sites in northern Japan, added in 2021. The arrangement is quite small and elegant, a double ring of river stones in a grassy field, and nobody knows for sure what it was for. Graves, ceremonies and a calendar of the seasons are all guesses, and it is better to stand there and hold the question than to pretend to an answer.
It is close to Sannai-Maruyama, the great settlement site on the edge of Aomori city, where you can walk through reconstructed longhouses and a huge six-pillar tower and see how these people lived by hunting, fishing and gathering chestnuts. Together the two places show that northern Japan had a long and settled culture, rich enough to build monuments, many thousands of years before the first emperors.
Aomori is a city of nearly three hundred thousand with every service, and Namioka, a smaller town to the south-west, is quiet and rural, with apple orchards all around. Aomori is Japan's great apple region, and in late summer and autumn the roadside stalls sell fruit, juice and apple pies. Fuel is easy in the city and in the larger towns along the main roads, but remote areas have fewer pumps.
The riding is worth the journey. Just south of the city the Hakkōda mountains rise out of beech forest, and the road over them, with its views, volcanic scenery and long gentle bends, is one of the best in the north. It is closed by deep snow in winter, and opens in spring, when walls of snow still line the road in April. Beyond are Lake Towada and the Oirase stream, one of the loveliest forest roads in Japan, especially in October, when the maples turn red. Summers are cool, mist is common, and the weather can change quickly on the high ground, so bring a layer.