3 decades of trips have fostered a Japanese visitor’s passion for Point Hope

About 30 years ago, a 26-year-old man traveled from Japan to Point Hope and pitched a tent on the beach along the Chukchi Sea. Since then, he has been coming to the Northwest Alaska village each year, helping residents during the whaling season and forming lifelong friendships.

“Every year, I’m coming back,” Shingo Takazawa said with a broad smile. “Lots of family and good people live here.”

In May, Takazawa was on the ice outside Point Hope, chatting with everyone around. After camping with the whaling crews for several days, he was helping them bring the bowhead on shore, joining the long line of men pulling on the rope.

“He is one of us now,” said Point Hope resident Jeff Kowunna, a friend of Takazawa’s.

Takazawa, 56, grew up in a small town in Gunma prefecture, 50 miles northwest of Tokyo. As a child, he would spend his time crawfishing in a small stream next to a rice field and biking around all day. Every summer, Takazawa’s family would go to a small fisherman’s island named Sakatejima, where his mother is from, and there Takazawa enjoyed swimming in the ocean and playing by the beach.

Since he was young, Takazawa said, he has been drawn to books and TV shows about foreign cultures, always fascinated with stories from “a different world.” But the Arctic was calling him the most.

In middle school, Takazawa stumbled upon the book “Running to the Far North,” in which explorer Naomi Uemura wrote about mushing dogs in Greenland. Then Takazawa read “Arctic Circle 12,000 km,” about Uemura’s two-year-long mushing trip from Greenland to Kotzebue.

“He was my hero. I read his books so many times,” Takazawa said. “I was thinking to visit Greenland someday but never got there because I found my place in Alaska.”

After Takazawa graduated college from Tokai University with a degree in oceanography, he decided to travel to the Arctic. He first went to Utqiagvik and Kotzebue but felt that his hunger for adventure wasn’t satisfied.

He arrived in Point Hope on a warm afternoon in late August. The village’s flight agent asked him what he was going to do, and he responded that he wanted to camp by the beach. The agent drove him in her all-terrain vehicle and asked which side of the beach he preferred.

“I thought the south side might be brighter,” he said. “I was young, I didn’t know anything about anything.”

The beach was right in front of the town, and everybody in the village could see the newcomer. In the evening, local children started coming by, curious about who he was. They asked Takazawa where he was from, what gear he had and what Japan was like. As the night grew closer, some visitors went home, but more people kept coming, up until midnight.

Several children — including Kowunna, who was in sixth grade then — teased the newcomer by throwing pebbles into his tent. Later on, when Kowunna eventually saw Takazawa in their house, he thought he was in trouble.

“I was scared that Shingo would know it was me!” Kowunna said. “But he didn’t — until a few years back.”

The two men have become friends throughout the years.

During his first days in Point Hope, communication wasn’t easy: Though Takazawa studied English in school in Japan and thought he would be able to speak the language, the reality was different. People struggled to understand Takazawa as well.

He pointed to words in the dictionary he brought with him to get his point across.

“I said ‘hungry!’ but they didn’t recognize what I said, so I pointed to ‘hungry,’ ” he said.

He asked at the store where to find a restaurant or a coffee shop in town and he learned that there was none. A resident, Emily Lane, invited him over for lunch, and the next day, took him to Cape Thompson on her ATV. During the trip, he was mesmerized by the view — and by Lane’s ability to tell time by the sun.

The second evening rolled in, and kids were coming again. Feeling tired, Takazawa decided to ignore curious visitors this time.

“I heard footsteps approaching and I heard a voice that was not a kid’s voice,” he remembered. “I opened my tent, and there was a lady standing.”

The woman, Eva Kinneeveauk, invited Takazawa to visit her house. Since then, the Kinneeveauk family has hosted the Japanese traveler year after year.

During his first seven years of trips, Takazawa would visit Point Hope for just three to four days each summer, riding ATVs with new friends and walking around the tundra. But in 2000, Popsy Kinneeveauk landed his first whale, and everything changed.

By the time of Takazawa’s visit that year, the community was preparing for the whaling feast, making mikigaq, or fermented whale meat and blubber.

“I’m helping ladies, cutting the meat, and one lady said, ‘Your Eskimo name is Mikigaq!’ ” he laughed.

After that, Takazawa started coming for longer visits — two to three months every year — except for one year during the pandemic. He times his visits around whaling, as well as seal hunting, caribou hunting and collecting murre eggs at Cape Thompson. As a nonresident, he can’t be a subsistence hunter, but he assists his friends as much as he can.

“Whaling is the best. I like to stay on the ice,” he said. “I feel really peaceful.”

In Tokyo, Takazawa works as a researcher at an environmental research company, studying water, plankton, benthic organisms and fish. When he was interviewing for the job, he said that he would need time off every year to visit Point Hope.

“Lots of friends (used to) say something, like ‘You are crazy,’ " he said. “But right now they say nothing no more.”

Outside of work, Takazawa likes to paddle in his Greenland-style kayak and ride his motorcycle around town and to other cities.

“Riding a motorcycle in the strange town, that is such a peaceful time for me,” he said.

After coming to Point Hope for so long, living between two places feels natural to Takazawa. With the growth of social media, he feels close to his community even when he is away.

In Point Hope, he has seen children growing up, Elders dying and friends getting married. He has noticed how the Inupiaq language is heard less around town but technology has become more accessible.

“I have two different lives that are not different for me,” he said. “I have my life in Point Hope and I have my life in Japan that is the same for me. It’s very far from Tokyo to here, but it’s like I’m staying next city or something. I don’t feel far. … I feel like just visiting a neighboring town.”

But most of all, he enjoys spending time with his friends, deepening his relationships and creating memories.

“Everyone you see here is a friend,” he said.