Akankohan Eco-museum Center was added to Your Favorites!
Akan-Mashū NP, Hokkaido
Claim this place to tell your story your way.
Look for himemasu in the center’s aquarium: this tasty fish is landlocked sockeye, naturally found in Japan only in Lakes Akan and Chimikeppu. The local Ainu honor it at Kapachiep-nomi, a July gratitude ceremony.
The center is one of only 2 places to see living Lake Akan marimo in an aquarium. Their wild colonies are carefully protected, so visitors normally can’t view them in the lake itself.
Those familiar green marimo balls aren’t single round plants: each is a sphere of countless fine green algal threads. The same alga can also cling to rocks or drift in loose, cottony mats.
Marimo become spherical as waves roll their filaments over the lakebed, letting all sides receive light. Lake Akan’s shallow bays, wave-making winds and mineral-rich springs create a rare combination for large colonies.
The center’s aquarium has shown an albino himemasu—a pale color form of the local landlocked sockeye—alongside marimo and other Lake Akan fish. It’s an unusually light-colored resident in a tank of familiar lake life.
Just outside the center, the Bokke trail leads to bubbling mud vents. “Bokke” comes from an Ainu word meaning “boiling”—a fitting name for these geothermal mud volcanoes at the forest’s edge.
Inside, a giant aerial photograph of the Akan region covers the exhibition floor. Insect calls play as visitors explore, and some plant and animal specimens can be touched—turning the landscape display into a multi-sensory experience.
Look for the Ito in the aquarium: it’s Japan’s largest freshwater fish, and in Japan wild populations survive only in Hokkaido. Akan is also one of the few places raising this threatened giant salmonid.
The center’s Maeda Ippoen exhibit traces a surprising legacy: Maeda Masana opened a ranch on Lake Akan land in 1906, then reportedly urged that its mountains be admired, not cut. His family later donated its assets to a conservation foundation.
A boardwalk behind the center crosses a small wetland where skunk cabbage blooms from late April into mid-May. The white flowers are one of the first signs that spring has reached the Lake Akan shore.
The center’s story starts in 1967, when Hokkaido opened a prefectural visitor center here. An Environment Agency center was added on the site in 1983, and the facility was remade as the Eco-museum Center in 2002.
