In the late 19th century, prisoners were sent to Abashiri to build their own prison and open up the north of Japan with chains, picks and snow. Today, the place is a museum. The mood, though, has stayed.
A prison, the cold, and well-oiled systems
I really wanted to see this prison. Not out of morbid fascination, not out of carceral passion. Just because Abashiri carries this somewhat heavy, almost mythological reputation in the Japanese imagination. The kind of place whose name alone is enough to make clear that it’s no joke. The weather wasn’t great: all the better. Abashiri in the sunshine would probably have lost part of its interest! What you visit today is the Abashiri Prison Museum. Not a working prison, but the old one, preserved like a slightly awkward witness. Everything is wood, low-ceilinged, functional. Corridors that creak. Tiny cells. And that persistent sense that the cold is built into the architecture, as if it were part of the house rules.
Very quickly, you understand that confinement here wasn’t limited to closing a door. It was also being placed in an environment where nothing — absolutely nothing — was designed for comfort. Not to punish spectacularly, just to wear you down.
A territory built with chains
Abashiri isn’t just a prison. It served to open the way, literally, to the colonisation of Hokkaidō. In 1890, the Japanese state sent hundreds of prisoners there to build 163 km of roads deep in the freezing forest, with their bare hands, sometimes shackled two by two with iron balls at their feet. It’s estimated that at least 200 of them died during the works. No monuments for them. Buried on the spot. Still in chains.
The museum soberly evokes the routine: up at dawn, work under the snow, meagre meals, collective punishment. At night, the prisoners slept with the back of their neck resting on a wooden plank. The guards struck it with a mallet to wake everyone at once. It became an expression: tataki okosu, “to strike awake”.
You move among slightly frozen mannequins. A communal bathroom, scenes of silent meals, glacial cells. Everything is neatly museumified, almost too much. But what you feel is that the prison wasn’t a failure of the system. It was the system. A tool to produce: roads, submission, order.
The character didn’t like the script
And then there’s Shiratori Yoshie. The guy the script didn’t interest. Convicted for theft, wrongly accused of murder, tortured into confessing. He escapes. Once. Twice. Three times. Four times. At Abashiri, he’s locked in a special cell, triple-bolted in handcuffs. He scrapes his chains every day with his miso soup, wearing the metal down with salt. Months later, he dislocates his shoulders to slip through the food hatch. He escapes, into the snow, with no shoes. He refuses the role he was assigned. And there, it’s impossible not to smile, with a faint unease, thinking of Carlos Ghosn! Obviously, it’s another planet. At Abashiri, we’re talking storms, chains, hunger. For Ghosn, the escape happens in an audio-equipment case, private jet, a stopover in Turkey, arrival in Beirut. But both stories ask the same question: what do you do when you decide to stop following the rules of the game? One does it to survive. The other to escape a trial. Two men facing two systems perceived as inevitable. And that fascination we all share, in a low voice: but how did he do it?
A museum that isn’t trying to be nice
What I found interesting at Abashiri is exactly that: the absence of effects. The place doesn’t try to shock, nor to move you. It lines up the facts, the spaces, the anecdotes. And that’s enough. You discover that the prisoners grew their vegetables, made their miso, carved wooden dolls (nipopo), and, since the 1990s, even raise A5-grade wagyu. Yes, exceptional beef, produced by inmates. At the museum entrance, a restaurant serves a carceral wagyu burger. You can even taste the prisoner’s menu…
No folklore here. Just a place where people produced, straightened out, punished, reintegrated and sometimes crushed. In Japanese culture, Abashiri has become a figure: films, manga (Golden Kamuy), the prison’s own Stout beers. An icon. But on the spot, far from the cinema, what remains is the harshness, the repetition, the damp of the wood, and that strange feeling that the institution itself never really escaped.
Abashiri doesn’t tell a nice story. It just reminds you that some systems work very well, until the day someone decides to stop playing the assigned role.
See also: Nara Prison, the other great carceral name in Japan, soon to be turned into a luxury hotel.
