Otaru

A Few Days in Otaru

My time in Otaru was the segment of the trip with the least planning and specific expectations. I went there immediately after a week and a half of detail about the prehistoric Jōmon culture — visiting the National Museum in Tōkyō on my first full day in Japan, and then traveling north to see reconstructed settlements and museums around Aomori and Hakodate.

At that point I was ready to take it easy for a few days in Otaru.

Otaru had been an Ainu settlement, just a village at the Meiji Restoration in 1868. By 1880 the first railroad line in Hokkaidō connected Otaru to Sapporo.

The Emperor decreed Otaru to be an open port for trading with the U.S. and the U.K. in 1899.

At the end of the Russo-Japanese War of 1904–1905, Japan took control of the southern part of Sakhalin, the territory south of 50 °N making up about 40% of the island. Otaru was the port for trade with South Sakhalin. The Soviet Union took over all of Sakhalin at the end of World War II.

Much of what I saw in Otaru was part of the maritime trade of the late 19th century into the 1930s.

Portion of Operational Navigational Chart F-10 from the Perry-Castañeda Library Map Collection at the University of Texas at Austin.

Historic Warehouses and Stores

I stayed at the Otaru Tap Room and Hostel, the dark wooden building at left in the below picture. The building to its right, partly rebuilt in fireproof stone after a 1904 fire, had a purple historical sign out front. The historical signs in Otaru have Japanese at the top, then English and Russian, and then Chinese and Korean. From Otaru it's about 410 kilometers to the coast of Russia, between Terney and Rudnaya Pristan', and over twice that, about 845 km, to central Tōkyō. However, I was in Otaru a little over two years into Russia's invasion of Ukraine, and I didn't notice any Russian visitors during the four weeks I was in Japan.

The sign said:

Directly across from the tap room and hostel was another marked building:

Otaru and Hokkaidō in general were of little military importance during World War II. Otaru had a prison camp where they kept Aleut natives captured in June, 1942, when Japanese forces seized Attu, the westernmost of the Aleutian island chain. That was the extent of the military installations in and around Otaru. And, until the final months of the war, Hokkaidō was beyond practical range of bombing missions.

The U.S. was reading Japan's communications, both the Imperial Navy codes and ciphers and the diplomatic system, encrypted and decrypted with a machine the U.S. refered to as PURPLE.

An invasion of Japan was expected to kill millions, some directly from the fighting but more from the resulting famine.

Reading both the military and diplomatic traffic, the U.S. saw that the Japanese military leadership was well aware that continuing the war would be a form of national and cultural suicide. But, given the belief that the Emperor was a direct descendant of the gods, they were determined to keep fighting even if that meant killing every Japanese citizen.

By the early summer of 1945, the U.S. had run out of militarily meaningful targets in Japan. So, there were a few raids to "stir the rubble" of already destroyed cities, and other raids to strike cities of little to no military importance. The hope was that Japan's military leadership would come to their senses and surrender before the Manhattan Project's new super weapon was ready.

Hokkaidō was beyond the range of the large B-29 bombers the U.S. had based on Pacific islands well to the southeast of Japan. But on July 14th and 15th of 1945, the U.S. Navy's Task Force 38 had multiple aircraft carriers close to Hokkaidō. Carrier based bombers struck both Hakodate and Otaru. Damage was far less than that caused by the mass incendiary raids made by B-29s.

Across a parking lot from the hostel was a former warehouse now converted into a restaurant.

A four-story former kimono warehouse stands between two sections of covered shopping streets, mid-way between the waterfront and the train station.

The Otaru Canal

A canal runs parallel to the waterfront. On days with better weather, many people stroll along the broad path along it.

The wide stone Otaru Warehouse is close to the canal.

In front of the Otaru Warehouse is a statue of a Very Good Dog. Google Translate tells me that the vertical kanji says "Fire Department", which I had guessed because of the bronze hose to the right and nozzle to the left. The historical building descriptions had indicated that the fire department had plenty of work in the early 1900s.

To the Harbor and Around Central Otaru

Maps suggested where else to stroll.

The harbor opens into Ishikari Bay and the Sea of Japan.

A ferry company was running two ferries down the west coast of Honshū each day, one to Niigata and the other to Maizuru, north of Kyōto.

The area has rugged terrain, with the city in a narrow space between mountains and the sea.

A downhill ski area overlooks the town and there are rock outcroppings along the waterline.

Some of the track of the Temiya Railway, the first railway in Hokkaidō, has been left where it runs through central Otaru. It was the most popular place for photography.

KFC is popular across East Asia, but only in Japan do you find Samurai Sanders.

Amazon 1608689034

Cool Wet Weather in Otaru

I was in Otaru in the first week of May, but the temperature got down to just one or two degrees above freezing at night and it rained every day. That was fine, I had nothing specific planned beyond a couple of rest days.

One afternoon I sat in the taproom, sipped a Green Neighbors dry yellow hard cider from Iwate, and re-read the section describing Ainu beliefs and practices in Joseph Campbell's Primitive Mythology, Volume 1 of his Masks of God series. It's based on a 14-page article in the 1908–1926 Encyclopaedia of Religion and Ethics. (Volume 1, pages 239–252)

I didn't mind the cool, wet weather, I thought it made for a nice atmosphere.

The atmosphere was intensified by the lurid lighting at the neighborhood playground.

Back for More Seafood

I returned to the same place for dinner each night. The starter would be similar, but varied.

The small pressed fish wasn't always translucent. On this night there was a piece of surimi, white processed fish paste, and a lumpy fish ball as I had the first night.

As I said on the previous page, after the first night they recognized me and immediately waved me to a seat on the ground floor with the locals and regulars.

One night I got a combination of salmon and minced tuna over rice. The tuna had been reduced to a pink paste, it wasn't my favorite but it was OK.

Meanwhile, in the Sky

When I taught a class at Misawa Air Base in December 2003, I had been confined to the base. The U.S. Department of Defense pays Halliburton and other contractors to make overseas U.S. bases into microcosms of the former Confederacy. A few vending machines with unfamiliar beverages and Russian medium-wave signals had been the only real indication of where I was.

I brought a radio along on this trip, thinking that Otaru would be a good place to tune across the medium-wave band from 530 to 1600 kHz and catalog what I heard. However, the Sun had other plans. I was there during a severe solar storm and geomagnetic disturbance that rendered the medium-wave and short-wave bands useless.

The geomagnetic pole doesn't coincide with the geophysical pole, it's in northeastern Canada. So, Japan is much too far south for the aurora to have been visible. But the bands were wiped out.

Onward to Sapporo

Soon it was time to continue to Sapporo. That was a short trip, just over 40 minutes on the local train.

Next❯ To Sapporo