Shiretoko

The name Shiretoko comes from the Ainu sir etok, said to mean the end of the land, or cape. On the Rausu side, settlers mainly from Toyama Prefecture opened fisheries centred on cod from the 1880s. On the Shari side, farming was tried several times at Iwaobetsu and Horobetsu from the Taisho era (1912 to 1926), but the harsh conditions drove the settlers off the land by around 1975.

Shiretoko National Park was designated in 1964. To protect the abandoned farmland from development, the mayor of Shari, Fujiya Yutaka, launched the Shiretoko 100 Square Metre Movement in 1977, asking for donations of 8,000 yen per 100 square metres. It is regarded as Japan's first national trust movement; by the 1996 financial year it had received 49,024 donations, and the last remaining plot was acquired on 9 November 2010.

In 2005 part of the peninsula and the surrounding sea, 71,100 ha in all, was inscribed as a natural World Heritage site. Seasonal sea ice forms here at the lowest latitude in the Northern Hemisphere, and the nutrients it brings feed plankton blooms that link sea and land, through salmon swimming upriver, to brown bears and Blakiston's fish owls.