Hakodate

Hakodate was founded in 1454, when Kōno Masamichi built a large manor house in the fishing village the Ainu called Usukeshi; the name may come from the Ainu hak-casi, a shallow fort. The area was long Ainu country, and the small Japanese foothold in southern Ezo was controlled from the 17th century by the Matsumae clan, who held a monopoly on trade with the Ainu and grew rich on fish, kelp and furs shipped south.

Everything changed in 1854, when the Treaty of Kanagawa named Hakodate one of the first ports opened to foreign ships; full foreign trade followed in 1859. Russian, American and British consulates, Orthodox and Catholic churches and Western-style houses filled the slopes below the mountain, and the shogunate built Goryōkaku, a Western-style star fort, to defend and administer the north. In 1869 the fort became the last stronghold of loyalists who had declared the short-lived Republic of Ezo; their surrender ended the Boshin War.

For decades Hakodate was Hokkaido's largest city, its wealth built on herring, squid, shipping and the ferry link to Honshu. A fire in 1934 destroyed about two thirds of the city's buildings, and the sinking of the ferry Tōya Maru in a typhoon in September 1954 cost more than eleven hundred lives — a disaster that helped make the case for the Seikan Tunnel, opened in 1988. Sapporo overtook it long ago, the ferry trade ended with the tunnel, and the population has fallen steadily since. The Shinkansen reached the outskirts in 2016.

Hakodate looks south and outward in a way no other Hokkaido city does. The treaty-port decades left a townscape of churches, consulates and merchant houses that the city has kept and restored, and an unusual religious mix for Japan: Orthodox bells, a Catholic church and a Buddhist temple stand within a few minutes of one another on the same hillside. Western influence shows in old brick, in the cafés and in the local taste for an early Western-style bread and cake tradition.

The night view is a civic possession. Residents will argue about the best hour and the clearest month, and the ropeway queue on a fine evening is part of the city's routine. The other great communal event is the port festival in August, when several thousand people dance the Ika Odori, the squid dance, along the main street — a set of simple arm movements almost everyone in the city knows.

The sea sets the tone elsewhere too: squid boats with their rows of lamps, market traders calling from the stalls by the station, and a working fishing fleet that has shrunk but not disappeared. Ainu heritage survives in place names across the peninsula and in the northern collections of the city's museum. As in much of Hokkaido, manners are considered a little more direct and less formal than in old Honshu cities, and the dialect is mild.

About 240,000 people live in Hakodate, down from a peak of more than 300,000, and the city has one of the faster rates of decline among Japan's mid-sized cities. The population is old, schools have merged and outer districts have thinned, while the area around Goryōkaku has become the everyday centre for shopping and offices, leaving the historic harbour quarter to visitors.

Fishing, fish processing and the port remain important, but catches have fallen sharply — the squid on which the city built its identity has become scarce and expensive in recent years — and tourism, health care, education and retail now provide most jobs. A public university specialising in information science sits on the eastern edge, and the Shinkansen has brought day visitors from northern Honshu.

Life runs on the tram timetable and the weather. Mornings begin early at the market by the station; evenings are quiet outside Daimon and the bay. Winter means shovelling, ice underfoot on Motomachi's slopes and roofs cleared of snow, and summer brings fog that can sit over the harbour for days. Depopulation, the future of the fishing industry, and how to look after a large stock of ageing historic buildings are the issues that dominate local debate, alongside the long-delayed extension of the Shinkansen to Sapporo, now planned for 2038.

Squid is the city's emblem and its most-eaten dish. Ika-somen, squid cut into threads as fine as noodles and eaten raw with soy and ginger, is the local speciality; ika-meshi is squid stuffed with rice and simmered in a sweet soy broth, a dish that spread across Japan as a railway lunch box; and dried squid is sold in every shop and grilled at market stalls.

Hakodate ramen is shio ramen: a clear, pale broth of pork bone and kelp seasoned with salt, with straight rather than curly noodles — the lightest of Hokkaido's three ramen traditions. The morning market beside the station is where the rest of the catch is eaten, in kaisendon rice bowls heaped with sea urchin, salmon roe, crab and scallops, and the surrounding waters supply the thick, sticky kelp used in soups and sauces, traded out of this port for centuries.

The port's history shows in the sweets and the burgers. Western-style baking arrived early with the foreign community, and the convent east of the city sells butter sweets made by its nuns. A burger chain found only in and around the city, each of its shops themed differently, is a point of pride. Dairy from the farms of southern Hokkaido turns up as soft serve, cheesecake and cream, and beer is brewed and drunk on the waterfront.