Hokkaido’s air gateway makes sure you know the direction and distance to delicious sushi.

You really can’t overstate how important good airport signage is for making travel stress-free and enjoyable. Especially if you’re an international traveler in a country where you can’t ask local staff for directions, large, easily noticeable multilingual signage directing you to where you need to be is a lifesaver.

We were reminded of this on a recent trip to Hokkaido. On our way back we were flying out of New Chitose Airport, the international air hub located near Sapporo that serves as Hokkaido’s primary non-sea link with the rest of the world. It was after getting our boarding pass and heading through security that we looked up and saw that the airport’s designers had had the forbearance to install signage to what may be the single most important airport facility of all. No, not “Departures,” and not “Restrooms” either. What this sign was pointing the way to was…

…”Sushi!”

Yes, inside New Chistose’s post-security departure area there’s a bilingual Japanese/English sign pointing the way to sushi, which also includes the distance (60 meters [197 feet]) and even a pictogram showing a pair of nigiri-style sushi pieces, for the benefit of travelers who can’t read either of the languages the information is written in. And no, this isn’t a joke. If you walk 60 meters in the direction of the arrows…

…you really will come to a sushi restaurant, called Suzuhana, which is your very last chance to eat Hokkaido sushi before your plane takes off.

But while the “Sushi” sign points the way to Suzuhana, it’s not an ad that the restaurant arranged to have put up. It really is a very specific piece of guidance that the airport management decided should be present to help travelers, as we learned when we spoke with Hiwatari-san, a representative for the airport’s detailing division.

“We actually don’t get too many travelers asking about sushi specifically [at the information counters],” Hiwatari explained. “The departure waiting area at our airport is laid out like a semicircle, though. That makes it hard to see what facilities there are farther down the corridor, and also hard to tell how far you’ll have to walk to get to them. So we want to make those things as easy to understand as we can, which is how the signage ended up like it is. If we just wrote ‘food,’ for example, people could take that to mean many different things, right? It could be ramen, maybe, or it could be soba. But if someone walks all the way there and it turns out to be ramen, but that person hates ramen, then they’ve wasted their time. Since many people in the departure area don’t have a lot of time, we wanted to avoid those kinds of situations by being more specific in our signage.” It just so happened to be, Hiwatari told us, that sushi, by coincidence, was the first dining option in that direction from the sign.

Honestly, after hearing the explanation we’re still a little confused, since for all the talk of attempted specificity, the “Sushi” signage is still flanked by the vague “Cafe” and even vaguer “Light Meal” signs, but perhaps that’s a result of those menus having too varied of menus to list their flagship offerings in the space available. Suzuhana’s offerings, on the other hand, are pretty much all sushi, so the “Sushi” sign makes sense, and we’re sure a lot of travelers are happy to follow it for their last meal in Hokkaido.

Photos ©SoraNews24
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Follow Casey on Twitter, where he know wants sushi guidance signage everywhere in his life.