While Niseko is a farming region, nowhere captures the romantic essence of the Hokkaido farming lifestyle more sweetly than the Milk Kobo.
In the green season, the dairy goods and farm lifestyle attraction is one of the busiest hives of activity in the area. City folk from Sapporo and beyond flock to the farm in the ski resort village of Higashiyama to escape the big smoke and embrace the countryside – even if just for a few moments.
It’s for this reason, says farm daughter and charismatic head honcho Yuko Takai, that Milk Kobo is such a success. It’s obviously also largely thanks to Yuko-san and her family’s talent for business and identifying a market, and also their honourable work ethic born from decades tending the dairy – the Takahashi Bokujou (farm) – that forms the backdrop to everything at Milk Kobo.
Yuko-san believes the reason Milk Kobo is so popular is because it encapsulates a different reality for people from the city. “It’s a bit like Disneyland – it’s somewhere people can go to escape reality,” she says.
“People in Sapporo have to work all day every day and then come home and look after their family. They come out here on the weekend and they’ve got Mt Yotei, the beautiful scenery, the fresh country air, and they can indulge in some sweet choux cream or other treats. It takes them away from their every day for a few minutes or hours while they’re here.”
The action at Milk Kobo takes place in a collection of red, farm-style buildings spread out over one lush, green corner of the farm, up towards the Niseko Village ski fields and golf course. The attraction features the famous ice cream and choux cream “factory”, which, separated by glass, doubles as the shop front for ordering your treats straight from the oven. In the same building is the ice cream servery, while across the way another building houses the “Milkuchen” roll cake bakery and a café, alongside an outdoor store for all your summer sports needs. Another small angular building is home to an arts and crafts workshop and souvenir shop, with a small farmer’s market attached.
Just a few summers ago they built a magnificent new building on the Mt Yotei side of the farm to house new fresh produce buffet restaurant, Prativo. Alongside it is a workshop space for visiting groups, and opening this year is a cheese factory, which will double as a pizza restaurant and produce market.
All in all it’s quite a significant little side-project for a dairy farm, but there is a very logical, fascinating and fortuitous story behind its existence.
Yuko-san’s great-great-grandfather settled in the area and started farming the land in the early part of the 1900s when there was nothing else there – except for the sasa (bamboo) grass and vegetation that was so thick one would barely know Mt Yotei and Annupuri were looming nearby. After Yuko-san’s uncle raised several cows that went on to win local competitions, her dad, Mamoru Takahashi, decided he’d like to branch out into dairy farming. He founded the dairy in 1970 as a side-project but business was good and it became the main business.
However in the early 1990s, a combination of factors resulted in the demand for milk and milk prices plummeting to a point where the commodity was cheaper than water. There were too many dairy farmers, families were having fewer children, and there was some misinformation going around saying milk wasn’t necessarily good for kids.
The cows they had couldn’t stop producing, and they still all had to be hand milked every day. Yuko-san remembers making school lunches for her brothers and being dropped off at her grandparents to be looked after as a child because her parents were working from 5am until after dark, seven days a week. Then at the end of the day they still had to throw out much of the milk they did collect.
But Mamoru-san is not one to quit. When it came time do decide whether to kill some of their cows, the family banded together – including 6-year old Yuko-san – and came up with another idea. The Milk Kobo was born.
At first it was just a simple ice cream store, before they started making choux cream puffs. They started making just 30 a day, but within a couple of years they needed to make 10 times that just to service the demand that extinguished their supply by 2pm every day. After building the new factory, these days they sell up to 1000 a day, sometimes more than 2000 during peak periods. Fortunately, with the farm and bakery all on site, they can ramp up the staff and production schedule – all of which you can watch through the glass windows into the bakery as it happens.
These days Milk Kobo’s products are in demand across Hokkaido. They are also about to open a new shop in Kichijoji in Tokyo. There are half the number of dairy farms in the area now, with others looking to close their gates. But Takahashi Bokujou is thriving and is now the biggest dairy farm in Niseko.
Now 33, Yuko-san first started working at Milk Kobo during school holidays around the time she was in her final year of primary school. At that time she dreamed of becoming the manager of the business, but within a few years her plans changed and she wanted to become a counsellor. Milk Kobo is so busy now that she has had to give up on that goal for the time being and focus on the business. However she says managing more than 50 staff, she ends up doing her fair share of counselling as it is.
Milk Kobo is a family run business to its core – both of Yuko-san’s brothers work there, as do her mother and father still today. But as manager and passionate contributor to Milk Kobo for so long, Yuko-san has played a key role in its success, always shrugging off praise of her dedication and the significance of what she’s achieved.
When times were particularly stressful, Yuko-san would hike the ski mountain in summer and look down over the farm and all the different buildings. Then she would look up at Mt Yotei and out over all the landscape her eyes could take in, all the way out to the Sea of Japan. In that moment, she could take stock of the stresses in her life and put them in perspective of where they fit in the wider world.
I guess this allowed her to escape her reality for a few moments, before returning and getting on with the job of crafting the quintessential Niseko farming lifestyle for visitors.