Hakodate

Exploring Hakodate City

I was staying in Hakodate while seeing some Jōmon culture sites along the nearby coastline.

The volcanic Mount Hakodate formed an island in the bay millions of years ago. About 3,000 years ago, a sandbar grew into an isthmus joining the island to the mainland of Hokkaidō. The city of Hakodate is largely built on that sandy isthmus. See the above map for details, it's from the Perry-Castañeda Library Map Collection at the University of Texas at Austin.

In 1854–1855 Hakodate became the first Japanese port opened to foreign ships. That led to it being the most important port in northern Japan, and the home of several influential foreign consulates. It also had a major role in the Boshin War, fought between the remnants of the Tokugawa Shōgunate and the newly powerful Meiji Emperor. The Naval Battle of Hakodate in 4–10 May 1869 was a decisive victory for the newly formed Imperial Japanese Navy, and was the end for a would-be secessionist movement based in Hokkaidō

World War II mostly bypassed Hakodate because it was already devastated. A fire on 21 March 1934 had destroyed about two-thirds of all the structures in Hakodate. Most of the surviving residents left the city. There were military fortifications in the region around Hakodate during World War II. But the only significant military activity in the area were ten POW camps.

In the summer of 1945 the U.S. air war against Japan had reached the point that targets of military importance were mostly destroyed. Hoping to get the Japanese government to surrender before the nuclear bombs were ready, the U.S. began heavy bombing of all remaining cities other than those on the list of nuclear targets. U.S. bombing raids on Hakodate on 14 and 15 July 1945 stirred the rubble of the 1934 fire. About 400 homes were destroyed, and an Aomori–Hakodate ferry was sunk with about 400 passengers killed.

I headed out for a full day of exploring Hakodate. I was staying just a block from the JR Station, where the flowering trees were in bloom.

Mount Hakodate is visible throughout the city.

Of course Hakodate has a kawaii mascot, it's a squid.

Cities across Japan have customized manhole covers. Hakodate's features squids. Most are just plain metal covers, but some are brightly painted.

Then I came across this variant design. Why does a squid need a mask and snorkel? It's like some of the conundrums posed by Spongebob Squarepants.

Along the Waterfront

A JMSDF base is directly across the harbor from the train station area.

The Mashū-maru ferry has been turned into a museum. Hakodate was once a very busy ferry port, connecting Hokkaidō to Honshū by carrying freight train cars and passengers between Aomori and Hakodate. The Seikan Tunnel connecting the two islands under the Tsugaru Strait opened in 1988. By then domestic air traffic was heavy. The Tōkyō–Sapporo link is in the world's top ten busiest city-to-city air routes.

The Shinkansen network was extended through the Seikan Tunnel in 2016, and narrow-gauge passenger trains stopped using the tunnel. The Shinkansen network currently ends at the Shin-Hakodate-Hokuta station on the north side of Hakodate. There are plans to extend it to Sapporo, with about three-quarters of the 211-km route in tunnels. Shinkansen passenger traffic hasn't grown as was expected in the early 1970s, so the extension work hasn't been urgently pursued.

Fishing ships go out through the Tsugaru Strait, east into the Pacific Ocean and west into the Sea of Japan.

Many of the brick warehouses from the 19th century shipping boom still stand.

They have been converted into shops and restaurants.

Lunch

There's a morning seafood market just south of the train station, where several restaurants stay open through lunch into early afternoon.

I got a drink, the popular Highball, with lunch. So, a small starter was included. I have heard the Japanese say "Don't be English" to explain this, meaning don't drink without eating something. You might rapidly become intoxicated the way the English do. That's good advice.

All identifications are vague and tentative, but: There was a sheet of squid thinly sliced and wrapped around a leaf; a crunchy white plant material, and purple seaweed.

Also some yellow plant material, possibly horseradish?

Also, a spicy sauce.

Already on the table was ground red pepper, ponzu sauce, and the "Hokkaidō's salmon seasoning" version of soy sauce.

The meal arrived — miso soup and a bowl of seafood on rice.

Shrimp and crab. Most of the crab meat had been extracted and shredded, but the claw also contained meat.

Museum of Northern Peoples

The Museum of Northern Peoples presents the related cultures of the people who have inhabited Hokkaidō, Sakhalin, Kamchatka, and onward through far northeastern Siberia and the Aleutian Islands.

Who "have inhabited", sadly, because Japan almost entirely wiped out Ainu culture. Hokkaidō and northern Honshū along with southern Sakhalin Island, the Kuril Islands, and southern Kamchatka were inhabited by the Ainu before the modern Japanese and Russians arrived. The Ainu were descendants of the Jōmon people. There isn't agreement on their relationship to the Emishi people, who remain only partly understood.

The Tokugawa Shōgunate controlled southern Hokkaidō and attempted to colonize Sakhalin. Direct warfare, policies of family separation and assimilation, and smallpox combined to greatly reduce the Ainu population through the early 1800s.

Then, the Meiji Restoration led to the Imperial annexation of Hokkaidō, with even more aggressive forced assimilation.

Meiji policies forced the Ainu off their land throughout Hokkaidō, giving it to the Yamato Japanese people for farming modeled on western industrial agriculture. The Meiji government prohibited the practice of Ainu religion, and forced the children into Japanese-language schools where the Ainu language was forbidden. In 1966 it was estimated that there were only 600 native Ainu speakers. By 2008 it was down to 100.

The Japanese government estimated in the early 2000s that about 25,000 people identify as Ainu.

The museum shows the parallels in clothing across the northern Pacific from Japan to Alaska, with differences in details.

These garments were worn by the Itelmen people living along the coast of the Kamchatka peninsula.

These inaw or carved wooden sticks with attached shavings were used in Ainu rituals. There's a possible connection back to the carved wooden sticks used in altars of the later Jōmon dwellings at the Ōfune Site, the Kakinoshima Site, and elsewhere. And, to the hidden wooden poles of prehistoric origin in Shintō shrines.

The ikupasuy were ceremonial spatulas the Ainu used in ritual prayers to the gods. Many represent animals thought to be gods visiting the human world, including bears, owls, and orcas.

There were many everyday items used by the northern peoples — harpoons, fishhooks, skis, and so on.

Russian Church

To make sense of Russian Christianity in northern Japan, first consider the earlier Portuguese and Spanish missionaries and Dutch traders in southern Japan.

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Portuguese traders first landed in southern Japan in 1543. The Portuguese Jesuit missionary Francis Xavier arrived in 1549 at Kagoshima on Kyūshū, the southernmost of Japan's four largest islands. He started a program of Christian evangelization planned to spread throughout Japan, then left for China in 1552 and soon died there.

Meanwhile many Japanese daimyōs or warlords were converting to Christianity, thinking that this could reduce the power of the Buddhist monks and boost trade. Portuguese traders, influenced by the missionaries, were more willing to stop at a port controlled by a Christian daimyō — conversion provided better access to European firearms and saltpeter for making gunpowder.

The most prominent daimyō convert was Ōmura Sumitada. He granted a permit in 1571 to a Jesuit missionary and a Portuguese Captain-Major for establishing a Portuguese port in Nagasaki. It quickly grew from a fishing village into a diverse trading city.

In 1575, Pope Gregory XIII issued a papal bull proclaiming that Japan belonged to the Portuguese Diocese of Macau, near Hong Kong along China's coast. The Jesuits had the exclusive right to propagate Christianity within Japan, and the Portuguese had the exclusive right to trade between Japan and the Christian world. The Emperor and shōgunate were not immediately notified of this development.

In 1587, Toyotomi Hideyoshi's campaign to unite all of Japan reached Kyūshū. He met with the Superior of the Jesuit mission in Nagasaki, and was alarmed to hear him boast that the Jesuits could summon Portuguese warships and organize Christian daimyōs to support Hideyoshi's invasion of Korea. Hideyoshi soon took control of the city and ordered that all missionaries be expelled. However, that order was mostly unenforced.

Meanwhile, the Spanish and Portuguese crowns had merged in 1580. The union agreement said that Spain would not interfere with Portugal's colonial empire. However, the Franciscan and Jesuit missionary factions remained in competition.

In 1596, the Spanish ship San Felipe wrecked off the coast of Shikoku, Japan's fourth largest island. The ship was carrying Spanish Franciscan missionaries. Its pilot casually pulled out a map showing the extent of the Spanish Empire, then told Hideyoshi that Spain routinely sent missionaries as an advance wave for a military invasion. That had happened in the Americas — send in the missionaries, convert some of the locals, then they support the Conquistadors who come later. Then two officers explained that Spain and Portugal were two empires but controlled under one king. That contradicted the earlier Jesuit explanations that Portugal and Spain were nothing to worry about, just two totally separate small countries with no colonial ambitions.

Hideyoshi was furious. He had twenty-six Christians marched to Nagasaki, the center of Japanese Christianity, and crucified there. This led to a new wave of persecution of the Japanese Christians, whose numbers may have reached as high as 300,000. The rival Christian factions argued over who was more to blame for the San Felipe debacle.

Tokugawa Ieyasu took power in 1603, and he initially tolerated Roman Catholicism because many Catholic daimyōs had been his recent allies.

Tokugawa consolidated his power in 1614, officially banned Roman Catholicism, and ordered all missionaries to leave. Most of the Catholic daimyōs renounced the faith and forced their subjects to do so. The minority that would not left Japan for the Portuguese colony in Macau, the Spanish colony in Luzon in the Philippines, and Japantowns across Southeast Asia.

Some Portuguese traders had been allowed to stay in Nagasaki on a 120×75 meter artificial island in the harbor. In 1639 the new Shōgun, Tokugawa Iemitsu, had become fed up with the Portuguese. He banished them, and moved the Dutch trading post from its small island to the better location formerly occupied by the Portuguese. Starting in 1641, only Dutch and Chinese ships were allowed to come to Japan, and could only land in Nagasaki harbor.

The Dutch were there strictly for business. Every ship was inspected, searched for religious items. The ban on Dutch books outside their small private island was lifted in 1720. Hundreds of scholars came to Nagasaki for "Dutch Learning", the general term for European science.

A U.S. Navy expedition sailed into the harbor of Edo, the Shōgun's capital, in 1853. It forced the Shōgun to capitulate to U.S. demands to open Japanese ports for foreign merchant ships. That led to the fall of the Shōgun and the Meiji Restoration in 1868, which included a redefinition of Shintō emphasizing the Emperor's divine nature.

Japan and Russia had been competing for control of lands north of Honshū including Hokkaidō (then called Ezo), Sakhalin, the Kuril Islands, and the Kamchatka peninsula. There were both Japanese and Russian colonial outposts scattered through the region. Hakodate was controlled by Japan, but it had a Russian consulate.

On 2 July 1861 Nikolai Kasatkin landed in Hakodate as a priest attached to the chapel of the Russian consulate. He came to be known as Николай Японский, Архиепископ Японский or Nikolai of Japan, Archbishop of Japan. And then he eventually was known as Holy Saint Nikolai, Equal-to-the-Apostles. He founded the Orthodox Church of Japan, an autonomous Eastern Orthodox church within the jurisdiction of the Moscow Patriarchate.

In 1870 he was promoted to archimandrite and moved to Tōkyō. At that time the Orthodox community in Japan included over 4,000 people. The church made it through the Russo-Japanese War of 1904–1905, attending to the spiritual needs of the 73,000 Russian prisoners of war held by Japan. The POWs built several chapels and the church grew. By 1912 it included about 33,000 people in 266 Orthodox congregations.

The remaining Orthodox church is a landmark of Hakodate, a few blocks up the steep slope at the base of Mount Hakodate.

I was at the church on May 4, 2024, which was the day before Easter on the Orthodox calendar.

There is a complicated and historically ambiguous algorithm for calculating the dates of Easter on the Julian calendar as used by the various Orthodox churches, and on the Gregorian calendar based on a reform published in 1582 by the same Pope Gregory XIII who had declared that Japan belonged to the Roman Catholic Diocese of Macau.

In the papal bull about the calendar, he wrote that the reform, whose need was becoming quite obvious due to the axial precession of the Earth, would restore the celebration of Easter to the rules fixed by the ecumenical council of Nicaea. But that council had not defined any such rules, other than to say that all Christian churches should agree on a date and it should be based on the Jewish date for celebrating Passover.

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The current practice of Easter calculation is confusing. It's relative to the March Equinox, which can fall on the 19th, 20th, or 21st. Then it's based on a lunar month, but is it anchored to the beginning of the lunar month or the 14th day within it? For the astronomical part of this, where should the defining observation be made — Jerusalem, or the headquarters of the denomination, or the point of celebration?

In the U.S. the rule simplifies to the Gregorian calendar Easter being the day after The Ten Commandments is broadcast on TV (that is, the Sunday after Passover), and for Orthodox Easter, look up whether it's the same day, one week later, or five weeks later. Orthodox Easter in 2024 was May 5, just three days short of the latest possible date.

I've been to Greek Orthodox Easter services in Athens and Heraklion, and they're fantastic. And, I've been to Russian Orthodox services in Sankt Peterburg. However, the Orthodox Church in Japan celebrates its liturgy in a somewhat archaic form of Japanese, and I wouldn't get anything out of a Japanese service whether archaic or hip and modern. Occasionally they have services in other languages including Church Slavonic and Greek, but not on Easter of that year. Besides, someone had informed Google Maps that the church would be closed all of Easter Sunday, and I had already bought a train ticket departing Easter morning.

Pictures aren't allowed inside, I bought a postcard. It struck me as what I suppose I should have expected, obviously in the style of Russian Orthodox, but not from Russia.

Nikolai's early plan was to make Orthodox Christianity the state religion of Japan, serving the state and protecting Japanese culture from western influence.

The Russian Revolution of 1917 wrecked that plan. In following years the Japanese government viewed the church with suspicion, as a probable cover for Soviet espionage. Then the Great Kantō Earthquake of 1923 destroyed the church's headquarters in Tōkyō. The Sino-Japanese war of 1937–1945, which blended into World War II, made things even worse.

In 1946 the U.S. Occupation set up the New-York-City-based Metropolia church office as the authority over the Orthodox Church in Japan. Then, well, good luck making sense of the status of the various branches of, and alternatives and competitors to, the Moscow-based Russian Orthodox Church around the world from the 1917 Revolution to today. For the specific case of the Orthodox Church in Japan, its tiny size all along might make any analysis either easier or harder, but I can't tell.

Today the Orthodox Church in Japan has a total membership of around 9,250 people. I think that most of them live in and around Tōkyō, where Nikolai established the national church headquarters. I was seeing some Russian language signs in Hakodate. But with Russia a little over two years into its invasion of Ukraine, I overheard no actual Russian tourists. Listening for them wasn't a full-time task. I only saw a handful of westerners in Hakodate — two around this church and maybe ten around the nearby Anglican and Roman Catholic churches, a dozen or so at the summit of Mount Hakodate, plus five or six across my visits to the train station.

Japan's First Concrete Electricity Pole

The official city tourism map shows the location of The First Concrete Electricity Pole in Japan. It's down the hill from the Russian church and one street over. I needed to find this!

Japan's first concrete electricity pole is just beyond the green light pole and to the immediate left of the "no parking" sign. It's still carrying three-phase power on a cross-arm at top, and a bundle of telecommunications lines below that.

A sign beside the pole, between the two short brown poles between it and the edge of the street, explains it. The "similar pole on the corner" is beyond the historic pole in this picture, at the street corner, almost behind the apartment balconies.

     This innocuous reinforced concrete pole was erected by Hokkaidō's electricity company in October 1923. Ten metres tall, it is 47 cm wide at the base and tapers to 19.5 cm wide at the top.

     In the early 20th century fire caused great loss of life and property in Hakodate. In response to this, concrete came to be recognized as a practical alternative to wood and was used in the city. The Higashi Honganji Temple in Motomachi is a notable example; this electricity pole is another.

     You may have noticed that there is a similar pole on the corner to your left which was reinstated in 1996 after having been relieved of its duties in 1971. They are often lightheartedly referred to as a married couple.

     This pole has been here since the days when wooden electricity poles were the norm, and even though it has surpassed its expected service life, it now stands as a point of reference for change in the city.

CITY OF HAKODATE

Mount Hakodate

Of course I had to visit the 334-meter peak of Mount Hakodate at sunset. But this was almost the end of Golden Week, so everyone else was also going.

A bus was scheduled to run every twenty minutes from the bus station lot next to the train station. A rough estimate of line length and bus capacity said that I would be on the fifth bus, an hour and forty minutes away.

No, it was Golden Week, so the city was running extra buses. I was on my way within twenty minutes.

I arrived at the peak soon before sunset.

There's a view to the south, out of the bay into the Tsugaru Strait toward Honshū.

The peak is home to many antennas.

There's a fantastic view over the harbor and the city.

Toward the right side of this one you can see the Russian church, white with a light blue roof.

The sun continued to set. Because of the time zone Japan decided to use (or maybe this goes back to the U.S. Occupation?), in early May the sun rises around 04:35 and sets around 18:30. I live on the very western edge of a time zone, and Daylight Savings Time shifts the rise and set times even later, so I am accustomed to sun rise and set being about two and a half hours later. This takes some getting used to.

Another section of the observation deck has a view over both coastlines of the city. To see the classic night-time view of the city lights, you would have to arrive early to claim a spot at the railing.

From here I traveled by train to Otaru on the north coast of Hokkaidō.

Next❯ By train from Hakodate to Otaru