Otaru

The name comes from the Ainu, whose words for a sandy shore and a river describe the beach where the city now stands. Japanese fishing camps grew along this coast in the 19th century as the herring runs were exploited, and when the Meiji government began developing Hokkaido, Otaru's sheltered bay became the island's main port. Its first railway, opened in 1880 between the harbour and Sapporo and extended to the Sorachi coalfields, was the first in Hokkaido and one of the earliest in Japan.

Herring and coal made the city rich. Fishery bosses built timber mansions along the shore with quarters for hundreds of seasonal crew; banks, shipping firms and trading houses put up stone and brick offices on a street that became known as the Wall Street of the north; and the canal, completed in 1923, let barges unload ships anchored offshore straight into warehouses. Otaru was for a time the commercial capital of Hokkaido, and at the census of 1920 it was larger than Sapporo.

Then the herring disappeared from the coast in the 1950s, the coal trade collapsed, and container shipping moved to Tomakomai on the Pacific side. The canal was to have been filled in for a road in the 1970s; a long local campaign saved half of it, and the restored promenade and warehouses became the basis of a tourist economy from the 1980s. Love Letter, a film shot here in 1995 and a great success in South Korea, brought a wave of visitors from elsewhere in Asia. The city has been shrinking and ageing steadily since its peak.

Otaru's culture is built on the memory of its boom. The warehouses, banks and merchant houses are the city's principal asset, and their preservation — fought for street by street — is a source of civic pride and of continuing argument about what should be restored and who pays for it. Walking the canal at dusk, when the lamps light, is the local ritual as much as the visitor's.

Craft came out of industry. Glassworks that once made oil lamps and floats for the herring nets now blow ornaments and drinking glasses, and the mechanical music box, imported as a curiosity, became a local speciality with a museum and a street of shops. In February the two combine in the snow-lantern festival, when candles are set in hollowed snow and in glass buoys along the canal and the old railway track — an event run largely by volunteers and residents.

The sea sets the rest of the tone: an early-morning market culture, a street given over to sushi restaurants, and summer boat trips along the cliffs. Sapporo's closeness shapes daily life, since many residents commute there, and gives the city a slightly wistful character — an old commercial capital that now lives partly as its larger neighbour's day trip, and knows it.

About 107,000 people live in Otaru, down from a peak of some 207,000 in 1964, and the city has one of the higher proportions of older residents in Japan. Houses climb the slope from the harbour in terraces, and outlying districts have thinned as families moved to Sapporo or into the valley floor.

The economy runs on tourism, the port, fishing and food processing, retail and commuting. Cruise ships and ferries use the harbour, wholesalers handle scallops, squid and salmon, and glass, sweets and music boxes supply the souvenir trade. A commercial university founded in the boom years is still here, and a steady flow of residents takes the train to work in Sapporo each morning.

Winter dominates the calendar. Snow clearing on steep streets is a daily task for months, roofs are cleared, and buses run late in storms; the February festival is the one event that turns that weather into an asset. Depopulation, empty houses, the cost of maintaining a large stock of historic stone buildings, and a tourist economy concentrated into a few streets while the rest of the city quietly shrinks are the issues that come up most in local debate.

Sushi is the city's calling card. A street of specialist restaurants near the station, and many more around it, work with what the cold northern water provides: scallops, squid, flounder, herring, sea urchin, salmon roe and several kinds of crab. The cheaper version of the same thing is the kaisendon, a bowl of rice buried under raw seafood, eaten at the market by the station from early morning.

The herring years left their own dishes. Nishin soba, buckwheat noodles topped with a sweet-simmered dried herring, is a Hokkaido and Kyoto staple that makes particular sense here, and dried and pickled herring is still sold in the shops around the canal. Grilled scallops, steamed crab and boiled sea urchin appear at market counters, and ishikari nabe, a miso-based salmon hotpot, belongs to this coast.

Otaru also has an unusually sweet tooth for a fishing port. Western-style cake shops, cheesecake makers and confectioners line the old merchants' street, a legacy of a city that traded with the outside world early, and coffee houses in stone buildings serve them. Beer is brewed in a canal-side warehouse in the German style, and the Nikka distillery at Yoichi, half an hour west, supplies the whisky.