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| Yup. |
Therefore my employers generously decided to give us all two weeks off before we imploded. So we went to Hokkaido!
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Look at it! Isn't it great?
Hokkaido is the northernmost and most newly acquired part of Japan, annexed just after the Meiji Restoration in 1868. As a result, it's a pleasingly confusing mix of Japanese and Western influences, stark and modernistic and lush and comforting and all those other things that shouldn't really fit together but do. Also there's loads of fields and mountains and ponds. Best of all, the climate is bearable in summer. In Japan, bearable is as good as summer gets.
This was always going to be a more slow-paced holiday than usual. Ideally we would have explored the whole damn island, but it's just too big to cover without the aid of a teleport and/or loan sharks who can put up shinkansen fare. So we centred our trip around the capital, Sapporo, with a two-day trip to Hakodate at the beginning and a small day-trip to Otaru later on. Although Hokkaido is a popular summer destination for Japanese tourists, none of these cities have huge amounts of touristy fare to offer, so the focus was mostly on sucking in as much beer, ice cream and cool sea breezes as we could get. I wasn't too sad about that.
Hokkaido highlights part 1 - Hakodate!
At the south end of Hokkaido, on the heel of what geographers term "the shoe-shaped stringy bit", lies the port of Hakodate. In brilliant fashion I decided to start the trip by taking a plane to Sapporo and then a four-hour train, even though there's an airport actually in Hakodate. Whoops.
Hakodate is a weird one. Heading southwest from the station, I couldn't decide what it reminded me of: a film set for a Western, a small Irish town, a city in Russia, or - well - a Japanese port. It looked like all those things to me. The retro trams - some decorated with kawaii characters, others solemnly beige - added another layer of enjoyable incoherence.
As we walked past the end of the tram line, still pressing on towards the mountains crammed into the furthest corner of the peninsula, the environment shifted a little, this time like a New England beach town or maybe some little outpost in Austria.
I know that doesn't make too much sense. It didn't make too much sense. I loved it though. There's a stronger occidental influence here than in other parts of the country - Hakodate was the first port in Japan to be opened to foreign trade after the lifting of sakoku - and I loved the weird ways in which it showed. When I looked at my feet, the pavements looked like ones from home. (Except for not being covered in gum. Or seagull shit, even though it's a port. Dunno how Japan does it.)
Apologies for crappy layout. It's 1.16 a.m.
The guesthouse we stayed in was brilliant. I'd picked it for its cheapness and availability in a panic, but I'd recommend it to anyone. The room was lovely, with a sea view that was barely marred by the eleven or twelve mosquitoes we had to kill to get a decent night's sleep. The proprietors were super-nice too. They'd furnished the place with retro gramophones and wooden TV units, there were old records and English-language manga left about for our perusal, and they even gave us cookies when we left with a thank-you note!
I had a lovely conversation with the woman who gave me the cookie just before we left. She was washing the stoop (ah, so they clean things. That's why there's no shit around) and feeding pigeons. I asked what the word for 'pigeon' was in my, erm, pidgin Japanese.
"Nihongo de?"
"Hato desu."
"Ahhh! So desu!" I decided to stop talking before I told her I already knew that, because of a Japanese dating sim where you start romances with super-intelligent pigeons in a post-apocalyptic boarding school.
Nagoya (the city where I'm based) is also a port, but more of the 'we ship metal things from here' kind of port, not one you'd ever really want to visit for your marine-based kicks. I grew up by the sea; despite living in a coastal area for six months this was the first time I'd really seen it in Japan. I was surprised by how calm it made me. Like I was a boat that had finally moored or some shit.
We spent the evening desperately trying to find any restaurant, and ended up at the top of Mt. Hakodate, about a twenty-minute walk and a cable car away, which genuinely seemed the most convenient option at the time. The restaurant at the viewing point offered mostly seafood (which is gross) so I had to settle for an omelette, but the view was one of the highlights of the trip.
A cosmopolitan curve of a city. Yet another of Hakodate's many faces.
We only spent another half-day in Hakodate after that, wandering round the fish market (again: seafood is gross), eating delicious ramen at a hole-in-the-wall restaurant (egging on the chef as he flicked cockroaches away with a teatowel), and taking the tram out to a spot where you can bathe your feet in natural hot springs. On the street.
A long game of I-Spy ensued while we soaked our weird hairy toes and admired how pink our skin turned.
I'm glad we only allocated a small amount of time to Hakodate; despite the glories of its night-view the centre was a little sparse and there weren't a huge number of attractions on the maps we were given. However: walking out to the guesthouse, passing tram tracks, beach-houses, oddball architecture, and spending a quiet few minutes watching the waves roll into a tiny little corner of the bay rank as one of my favourite holiday moments ever. Having said that, maybe it would have been trumped if I'd seen these:
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| Coming up: Hokkaido Part 2: Sapporo |
