Some of the oldest pottery in the world was found on a hillside near the northern end of Honshu, and nobody was looking for it. At Odai Yamamoto I, on the Tsugaru Peninsula in Aomori prefecture, archaeologists dug up fragments of fired clay that date back more than sixteen thousand years, among the earliest known ceramics in Japan, made by hunter-gatherers at the end of the last Ice Age. The site is part of the Jomon prehistoric sites of northern Japan, a World Heritage listing from 2021 that celebrates a long era of settled life without agriculture, with Sannai Maruyama as its best-known example.
You get here by travelling to the far north. The Tsugaru Peninsula points up at Hokkaido across a narrow strait, and the road follows the eastern shore past small harbours, fishing boats drying nets and grey, windy beaches. The land is open, the forests are cypress and beech, and the sky seems bigger than farther south. In summer it is cool and breezy, with sea fog in the mornings, and in winter the peninsula is battered by snow and gales that can close the roads.
Tsugaru has its own dialect, cuisine and music. The Tsugaru shamisen, played with a percussive, almost violent attack, came out of these windy shores, and the apple orchards inland around Hirosaki and Goshogawara produce a large share of Japan's apples. The writer Dazai Osamu was born in Kanagi, in the same district, and his travel book about the peninsula is still read. The ride from here connects to the Omori Katsuyama stone circle near Hirosaki, another Jomon site, by roads that run through orchard country, flat and quiet, with the snow-capped cone of Iwaki-san as a backdrop for much of the way.
Practicalities matter in the north. Goshogawara is the nearest town of any size, some thirty kilometres from here, and stations are thin on the east coast, so fill the tank in Aomori or Goshogawara before you start. The best time to ride is from late May to October, with the clear air of early autumn the finest, when the apples are ripening. Sites are modest in the open air, and the museum nearby is the place for the story, so allow time for it. Bring a windproof layer, because the Tsugaru breeze finds every gap.