148 The captain and hostess in their new Hapi coats with the Hakodate squid on the back.
181 Fort Goryokaku from the tower. You can see the Magistrate’s house near the center of the fort. It’s surrounded by the city on all sides. If you’ve ever visited any of the old forts in the northeastern US you’ve seen this type construction. Fort Ticonderoga along the Hudson in New York looks just like this.
203 Part of a fish stall at the Morning Market.
208 Fresh squid being prepped for lunch.
227 Hakodate Bay on the right and the harbor on the left. Taken from the ropeway car.
272 Diana with some of the school girl volunteers.
Oct 2 – Hakodate, Hokkaido, Japan. Since this is our first port of call in Japan the immigration service wanted to see everyone on board. When we entered the dining room the ship’s staff gave us back out passports and we lined up to clear into the country. The inspectors brought portable iris and fingerprint scanners and everyone had to place both of their index fingers on little electronic pads to have our fingerprints recorded. The Japanese are extremely organized as a culture so the process went very quickly. Unlike most countries where our ship’s pass and driver’s license are all you need ashore, in Japan you have to carry your passport.
It’s the Amsterdam’s first visit to Hakodate and the city had a ceremony on the pier to welcome us. The mayor, the port administrator, director of tourism, Miss Hakodate and others were there to greet us. Short speeches were made during which the captain and ship’s hostess were presented with flowers, a plaque and colorful hapi coats that were emblazoned with caricatures of squid on the back, one of Hakodote’s icons. They were joined by uniformed school girls who were stationed at various places in the city to help us get around. They are learning English and volunteer for this job so they can practice on us.
Our tour today stayed in the city of Hakodate. Our first visit was at Fort Goryokaku and Tower. The fortress was the first European style fortress built in Japan. Takeda Ayasaburo, a Japanese scholar of Dutch studies, visited France and got a look at one of their forts. When he returned to Japan he reproduced it without the aid of drawings or pictures. It was finished in 1864. The magistrate of Hakotate’s house and offices were moved inside the fort under the new Meiji government. The reason the first western style fort was built so far north is that they feared Russian aggression. The island of Hokkaido is only separated from Russia by a very narrow strait. All of the fort’s structures are gone but the walls and ramparts are still very much intact.
In 1868 the samurai of the deposed Tokugawa Shogunate escaped imprisonment in Edo, now Tokyo, they seized a fleet of 8 warships, sailed to Hakodate and occupied Fort Goryokaku. The Japanese Imperial Army defeated them only 7 months later in what proved to be the last battle of the Japanese civil war and brought an end to the Japanese feudal system once and for all. Meiji control of the area was restored. So I guess the Battle of Hakodate was Japan’s Gettysburg. There’s a physical connection between the two wars as well. After the US civil war ended, the excess inventory of rifles was sold to the Japanese government. The presence of these rifles in the battle on the side of the Japanese Imperial Army gave them a decided advantage over the sword carrying samurai of the Tokugawa Shogunate. To quote a common movie line, “Never bring a knife to a gun fight.”
There’s a 90 meter tall tower just outside the fort’s park that allows for a great view of the fort, city, bay and surrounding area. I have to admit that it gave me a bit of a creepy feeling to realize that the fleet that attacked Pearl Harbor on December 7 was assembled in Hakodate Bay to begin their attack.
Inside the park, in its original location, they have reconstructed part of the Magistrate’s Office and home. The reconstructed part consists mainly of the administrative and ceremonial offices. Although the Meiji government had largely abolished the feudal system, the administrators were still samurai. The front of the building has a short tower in the center of the roof’s main gable. A large taiko drum was housed in the tower to beat out the time.
From the fort we drove back downtown to visit the Hakodate Morning market. After WWII, Japan’s economy and infrastructure were in ruins and many food items were hard to find. Since most of them came to the city by train, several black markets that sold food opened near the train station. The Morning Market is the only survivor of that era. It has over 400 stalls that sell food, clothing, shoes and souvenirs. Scattered in among the vendors are many small restaurants that specialize in sea food mainly as bento or donburi. There were several sushi shops as well.
The area is known for squid and hairy crab but all sorts of seafood are sold. Japanese tend to love the oily fishes so mackerel are common but there are also salmon, flounder and others too. The most unusual restaurant I saw specialized in squid. They have an oval shaped tank in the center holding a school of squid. They give you a little fishing pole with a hook attached and you fish for a squid. You have to hook them wherever you can as there’s no bait. When the fisherman pulls the squid out of the water someone’s going to get wet because the squid’s jet propulsion system is still squirting water.
Once you land the squid it’s put in a bucket and taken to the processor. In this case that was a young Japanese lady with a sharp knife and a cutting board. It was amazing to watch. She deftly separates the lower half of the squid with the tentacles from the cone shaped upper body. As she slices the skin of the cone lengthwise to remove the hard center she sets the lower body aside where oddly enough it does what amounts to 8 armed pushups until the neurons quit firing. Once the hard center is removed from the cone she slices that into nice calamari strips. Then she cleans the lower body cutting apart the tentacles and removing the beak. This freshly sliced squid is put on a small metal plate and served to the fisherman (or woman) with soy sauce and a pair of chopsticks.
This activity appeared to be a popular date lunch as most of the customers were young couples. The man usually let the woman catch the squid while he took pictures of the process. Ika can be a bit chewy but no one here seemed to be having any trouble eating them.
Next stop lunch. Unfortunately, the included lunches on HAL shore excursions tend to be in hotels. I say unfortunately because, while the food is almost always excellent, it is not usually local. For example, today we had some excellent chicken, vegetables, rice and salad but no seafood and almost nothing Japanese. The combos were mainly Chinese inspired, sweet and sour chicken for example. I usually finish eating quickly, I can eat at home. When I’m traveling I hate to waste time in a hotel eating. I hit the streets to find an ATM and postage stamps.
Many of the ATMs here in Japan require smart-cards so you have to search to find a machine that will take a normal US card. Fortunately those are found in the post offices so I could get Yen and my stamps at the same stop. The dollar will get you about 78 yen at the moment. I had purchased 2,000 ¥ on the ship but wanted about 5,000 more because we have 6 more days in Japan. That probably won’t be enough but I don’t want to have to sell any back because you get fees both ways plus the difference between the buy and sell rates. I like to get local currency at the ATMs because the money is converted at the spot rate and all you pay is a small fee to the bank a big advantage over currency exchanges.
Soon we were meeting up with our bus for the trip to the foot of Mount Hokodate and a cable car ride to the top. They call them ‘ropeways’ here because the language does not readily distinguish between ropes by material. We usually refer to metal ropes as cables, to them if it’s round in shape it’s rope.
We were only riding the ropeway up and our bus was driving to the upper parking lot to meet us. The views of the city and bay are beautiful from the top. We had a sunny clear day to take it all in. Unfortunately Diana got distracted by taking photos of the very cute school kids on tour and forgot that the bus was coming up to get us. She rode the car back down the hill and then couldn’t find the bus. Of course, I was blissfully ignorant of all this until she didn’t show up at the appointed time for pickup.
The guides and I searched the upper station and couldn’t find her anywhere. We got a call that there were some tourists at the base station so we drove down the hill. Unfortunately, none of them was Diana although we did find some of our missing travelers there. Now I’m becoming a bit concerned. It’s unlike her to be late back to the bus. I gathered our belongings and left the bus with the intention of continuing to look for her and then get a taxi back to the ship. Fortunately for me the Shorex manager was at the base station with some of his staff. I enlisted their help and we rode the car up to the top and searched again. Meanwhile he called the ship to see if she had checked back in. She hadn’t. He put an alert on her card in case she did come back. We rode back down and searched the base again. We were trying to decide what to do next when we got a call saying she was back at the ship. She had walked downtown and caught the ship’s shuttle back. A great relief to me and I suppose the Shorex manager, Nyron, as well. I rode back to the ship in the Shorex staff’s van and arrived back just as our bus was returning. They had gotten the word that Diana was back from the guide.
As we were preparing to sail away a large group of smaller school children performed a dance for us on the pier. They were so exuberant and lively that you couldn’t help participate in the spirit of the performance. A very nice sendoff.
The cast of the Amsterdam performed a Caliente, a show designed around mostly up tempo Latin music. We’d seen the show before but on the Prinsendam. Since that ship’s stage is so much smaller the cast is also smaller and everything is reblocked to fit. On the larger stage the performance is so much more energetic as they have more runway space.
Both Diana and I were pretty worn out from the day’s excitement so after I downloaded the day’s pictures to my computer we were ready to turn in.
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