Hirosaki

Hirosaki was created by a single family in a single generation. The Tsugaru clan broke away from their overlords the Nanbu at the end of the sixteenth century, were confirmed in their own domain in western Aomori, and in 1603 began laying out a castle town on the plain below Mount Iwaki. Tsugaru Nobuhira completed the castle in 1611, with a five-storey keep that burned after a lightning strike in 1627; the small three-storey keep that stands today was built in 1811 and is one of the few original ones left in Japan. Temples were arranged in belts around the town for defence, and samurai, merchant and craft quarters were set out on a grid that still shapes the streets.

The domain was rich in rice but exposed to the cold summers of the north, and the famines of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries killed thousands. In the Boshin War of 1868 the Tsugaru changed sides to the imperial government and kept their position. After the domains were abolished, Hirosaki became the home garrison of the army's 8th Division from 1898 and a centre of education with a strong Protestant mission presence; local carpenters built churches, schools and banks in imitation of Western models, several of which survive.

Apples changed the countryside. Introduced to Aomori in the 1870s, they took to the volcanic soil of the Tsugaru plain, and Hirosaki became the leading apple-growing city in Japan. The Second World War left the town undamaged, so its castle, temples and pre-war buildings remained, and in the post-war decades it turned to tourism, fruit and its university. Aomori prefecture's administration went to the port city of Aomori, leaving Hirosaki the historic capital rather than the political one.

The town's great public art is Neputa. In the first week of August, teams drag huge illuminated floats through the streets, the fan-shaped frames painted with warriors from Chinese and Japanese legend on the front and pale, unsettling figures on the back, to drums, flutes and a shout that differs from the one used in Aomori city's Nebuta. Preparation of the paintings and frames occupies craft workshops for much of the year.

Tsugaru has its own voice as well. Tsugaru-jamisen, a fast, percussive style of shamisen playing, developed among itinerant musicians in this district and is still performed in halls and restaurants here. The region's crafts include Tsugaru-nuri lacquerware, built up in many coloured layers and polished to a speckled finish, and kogin-zashi, a white geometric embroidery once used to strengthen hemp clothing against the cold.

Hirosaki also keeps an unusually strong Western thread. Missionary schools, apple orchards brought in by foreign advisers and the architecture of the Meiji era left a town of churches, brick warehouses, old coffee houses and French restaurants, a combination rare in northern Japan. Cherry blossom is managed here like an inheritance: the park's trees are pruned using methods borrowed from apple growing, which is why they flower so densely. Local manners are reserved and the dialect is thick, but hospitality towards visitors in blossom season is practised and warm.

About 157,000 people live in Hirosaki, and the number is falling as young people move to Sendai and Tokyo; the city has one of the older populations in a region that is ageing fast. Hirosaki University, with its medical school and hospital, is a major employer and keeps several thousand students in the centre.

Apples underpin the rural economy. The orchards on the plain are worked by family growers, many of them elderly, with picking from September to November and pruning through the snow in late winter; the fruit is graded, stored and shipped from the town, and processed into juice, cider and confectionery. Rice, vegetables and food processing fill out the farming year, alongside retail, local government and tourism, which concentrates into a few intense weeks.

Snow organises winter life: roofs are cleared, streets are dug out by municipal ploughs before dawn, and covered arcades and heated pavements keep the shopping streets usable. People live mostly in houses with steep roofs and in low blocks of flats, and almost every household has a car, though the town's flat centre suits bicycles for half the year. The pressures are familiar across Tohoku: depopulation, shops closing on the old main street as shopping moves to roadside stores, and orchards without successors.

Apples run through everything. Aomori grows about three-fifths of Japan's crop and Hirosaki more than any other city, so the fruit appears fresh and dried, as juice and cider, in curries and, above all, in apple pie: dozens of cafés, bakeries and hotels bake their own, and the town promotes a map of them. Autumn brings orchards open to visitors for picking and stalls of unfamiliar varieties.

Tsugaru cooking is plain and suited to long winters. Kenoshiru is a soup of finely chopped root vegetables, mountain plants and soya, simmered in miso and eaten in the new year, and kayaki cooks scallops, egg and miso in the shell over a flame. Tsugaru soba is bound with soya flour rather than wheat, giving a soft, dark noodle, and the local ramen is a broth of dried sardines, niboshi, that is stronger and saltier than the southern styles.

Vegetables are preserved as pickles against the snow, and the rice of the plain supports a number of small sake breweries. The Sea of Japan and Mutsu Bay supply squid, scallops and flatfish to the town's izakaya. The Western legacy is edible too, in old coffee houses, French restaurants and a locally made cider sold across the district.