Hakodate’s most famous tourist attraction is the morning market.  It’s larger than the Nijo market in Sapporo, and much closer to the ocean.  It is divided into three areas, one of which is a whole street of functionally identical restaurants all selling donburi bowls. This street was reminiscent of the similar “specialty” streets we had seen in Hiroshima for okonomiyaki, or Seoul for cutlass fish stew.

So for our second time on the trip, we got big bowls of seafood on rice for breakfast.  I got a mix including the local specialties of squid and crab.  Leigh, on the other hand, knows what her favorites are.

Our hunger satisfied, we took a walk around the market to see what else we could see.  There’s a famous stall with a tank where you can go fishing to catch a squid and have it cooked for you.  By 7:30 AM, there was a two hour wait for the privilege.

Which is interesting, because there were about ten more stalls elsewhere in the area where you could do the same thing with no wait.  But I guess the Instagram possibilities just weren’t as good.

We came across someone selling extremely fresh sea urchin on the half shell, and wanted to try that, but after we paid, the vendor pointed to the row of urchin and indicated we should choose one. Now, I don’t know what makes a good sea urchin, but I DO know the word for “you pick for me,” and the vendor found that pretty funny, so he gave us this.

So this was either a really good one that he picked because he found us entertaining, or a terrible one he realized he could foist off on the idiot Canadians.  Based on the flavour, which was delicious, I’m guessing the former.

Also, for those who know how much uni generally goes for, I’ll point out that this was ten bucks.

We also watched a crab do its level best to scuttle away from a vendor, so that was fun.

Once we finished poking around the market, we hopped on a bus out to the Goryōkaku Fort, which is a fortification constructed towards the end of the Tokugawa shogunate.  During the Meiji restoration, it was occupied by rebels intent on resisting the new power structure, but they were defeated and the buildings were destroyed.

However, in the early 2000s, it was decided to rebuilt the magistrate’s house as a museum and historical exhibit.  Seems like it would have been simpler to just leave it up, but what do I know?

A very impressive structure, nonetheless.

The actual grounds of the fort were also well worth exploring.

One point I want to make here.  If you read the blog from our last trip to Japan, it was extremely preoccupied with how ungodly hot the weather was.  Hokkaido in August is not as hot as Tokyo or Kansai in August.

But it IS hot.  We spent the morning wandering around outside at this fort and inside the museum, and we DID get pretty tired and sweaty.  So we decamped to the base of that observation tower in the prior picture to recover, drink a strawberry milk, and think about lunch.  (Hokkaido is REALLY serious about milk, and there’s milk drinks and ice cream everywhere as a result.)

While we drank our milk, I pulled out Tablelog, the Japanese website that’s like Yelp or Google reviews, but with the critical difference that it doesn’t suck.  Turns out there was a very highly regarded sushi restaurant… directly above us?  OK, well, why not?  We’re in a seaport town, why not fish for breakfast AND lunch?

And on stepping into the restaurant we decided we had definitely made a good choice, after they ushered us to our private cubicle.

Let’s zoom in on that sashimi platter, shall we? (And also move back in time to before we ate the sashimi.)

I would like to point out that the WHOLE GODDAM FISH at the upper left of this platter is entirely there for garnish.  Pretty slick.  The platter also included squid, because that’s Hakodate’s thing, and in addition, we decided to try a local specialty of semi-frozen squid marinated in its own liver.

It was… interesting.  Probably won’t be ordering it again, though.

Across the street from the fort was a museum that sounded worth a look, which had a general collection of contemporary Japanese art and a calligraphy collection.  Or at least, that’s how it was described online.  Turns out the calligraphy collection was a single room, and the modern art collection had been displaced for a TeamLab exhibition.  But that’s OK, as it turns out.

The calligraphy exhibition was tough, in that it’s hard to appreciate text art for a language you can’t read.  But one piece in particular really stuck out to us:

This is a poem by a Japanese poet named Yamamura Bocho.  The text of the poem is

“A field of rapeseed blossoms
A field of rapeseed blossoms
A field of rapeseed blossoms
A field of rapeseed blossoms
A field of rapeseed blossoms
A field of rapeseed blossoms
A faint wheat flute
A field of rapeseed blossoms
A field of rapeseed blossoms
A field of rapeseed blossoms
A field of rapeseed blossoms
A field of rapeseed blossoms
A field of rapeseed blossoms
A field of rapeseed blossoms
A field of rapeseed blossoms
The chattering of a lark
A field of rapeseed blossoms”

It’s exceptionally striking how the calligrapher deliberately mimicked the structure of a field of flowers while writing out the poem.

I only wish we had the tools to appreciate the doubtless comparable effects in the rest of the exhibit with more complex texts.

After we devoted all the appreciation we could to the calligraphy room, we moved over to the TeamLab exhibit in the next gallery.  It was… fine.  Definitely nowhere near as elaborate as the exhibition we visited in Tokyo.  Basically a single room of stuff almost entirely aimed at small children.  But we had fun coloring in a turtle and a jellyfish and then watching them swim around on the wall.

Deciding NOT to visit the adjacent fishing museum, which was apparently also entirely in Japanese, we instead stopped at a small cat-themed cafe for a snack before heading across town to go for a nice walk.

Specifically, we walked all the way out to a park at the very tip of the peninsula, where we could see the main Japanese island of Honshu in the distance.   Also more squid.

Still not the final squid of the day, either.

After a lovely hike, where we stopped to grab a geocache or two, we stopped back at a cafe right on the coastline for some crepes.  Check out this view from our table:

This looks vaguely magical realist to me, although I couldn’t tell you why.  After this, we headed into town to kill time until the dinner reservations the hotel had been nice enough to make for us.  While we were at it, we spotted this art, which may or may not be magical.  Definitely not realist, though.

I mentioned dinner reservations.  Reddit and Tablelog had suggested that we might like to try an izakaya called Izakaya Daimonten, known for, among other things, live squid sashimi.

At the time we placed the order, this entire squid was still swimming around.  The bit on the left was sliced up and delicious.  The bit on the right was… still twitching. Rather a lot.

When we finished the sashimi, they came and collected the tentacles and deep fried them for us.

My notes indicate that we also had some fried corn, clams in sake, fried cheese balls, fried octopus, a whole oyster, “plenty of crab” salad, and a couple of whisky sours.

Whew.  What a day.