It is the end of winter, 1854,
and you gaze across the glistening waters of Hakodate harbour. As far
as you're concerned, this is the greatest and safest port in the
world. But the light of the sun and cool, crisp winds of the sea do
little to comfort you.
You are on edge, and so is
everyone else still here. The authorities have herded the townsfolk
far away, along with their horses, their ships – is it because
those who are coming are frightening? Or is it that what they are
bringing, and you sense this too, might just herald the cataclysmic
collapse of your world, the only world your civilization has known
for centuries?
What goes through your mind, your
heart, as the Black Ships (kurofune, 黒舟)
loom into the bay? They intrude with the certainty of drifting death.
You know who is on them. And when the shogunate brought humiliation
on the imperial throne by giving in to the foreigners' demands to
open up, it is here – in Hakodate – that this capitulation
actually means something. That's why the Black Ships are here:
surveying the port they've coerced open to service the desires of
foreigners and their ships on whatever terms they wish; the port
which within five years, after centuries of seclusion, is to be
forcibly plugged into the wild and whimsical network of international
trade.
Within a few short years they'll
come and go as they please, bringing all their crazy ideas and
technologies with them, for good or for ill. And after a few years
more, the Japan of the Tokugawa shoguns will collapse on itself: and
right here, in Hakodate, is where its violent death throes will at
last subside, and its final pillar will crumble.
Hakodate is in many ways the
ultimate gateway, a bridge between eras and worlds. With typical
origins – settlers who put their structures down and chased out the
Ainu – Hakodate surged as the Matsumae clan's seat of power and
perch on the edge of Hokkaido, and grew into the springboard from which Japan would launch itself at the
untamed north. The shogunate, and dramatically more so the imperial
regimes that followed, would widen and strengthen this bridge, so as
to cross into Hokkaido and make it their own; and so too grow
stronger on what came from far across the sea – for once forced
open to trade, it was also a bridge to the world.
A bridge in time, too. On one
side, Japan the island fortress, the “locked country” (sakoku,
鎖国)
shut off from the outside world, which no Japanese could leave or
foreigner enter on pain of death. On the other, Japan the global
character: the creative, confused, sometimes brilliant and sometimes
bloody phenomenon it's been since its integration into the world's
diversity, a journey that continues to this day. Here was the threshold of this transformation.
This, all this, is Hakodate.
Wherever you tread, wherever you look and listen, history is in your
face and all around you. In Hakodate, more so than anywhere I've
been, history is the present.
One thing that makes this so is
its geography, which is impossible not to appreciate: for you can
tower over it from both ends and grasp the full extent of its
physical reality. From either Hakodate-yama – its famous mountain
at the peninsula's tip – or the Goryokaku tower deeper inland, this
entire unit of humanity compresses itself into your field of view.
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| From the north... |
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| ...and from the south. |
This is a city surrounded on
three sides by water, which at the peninsula's narrowest you can
stroll across in twenty minutes. A quintessential port: dockyards and
seafood and monster crabs and shio ramen and all. From one
vantage point, you can weigh with your eyes the sum of its
geopolitical and economic weight; and all the key acts – the Black
Ships, the trade and development, the climactic battle at the fort –
are there in one moment's plain sight, exactly where they occurred.
Who recognizes this guy? I expect Japanese people should, if only because every museum or
facility with any connection to nineteenth-century history is sure to
have him depicted in incongruously cute, chibi-style cartoons. It's
Commodore Matthew Perry of the United States, who arrived at the helm
of the Black Ships to demand Japan open up to foreign trade,
typically on more enjoyable terms for the foreigners than Japan.
Fearing that to refuse would be to get crushed, as was happening to
China, the shogunate accepted in the “Japan-US Treaty of Amity and
Friendship”; which perhaps would have been more accurately rendered
as “Unequal Treaty of Open This Door Or We'll Kill You”.
I have yet to reach a personal
verdict on Perry. Was he acting on behalf of an imperialist power,
with primary concern for casting further the net of its greed? Or is
there truth to those accounts that he took a genuine interest in and
concern for Japan, was respectful and balanced in his dealings, and
perhaps, sought a genuine friendship between the American and
Japanese peoples based on something much worthier than fear, which
would benefit both alike? My information is not conclusive enough to
let me decide; although today's Japanese, for their part, seem
largely to celebrate his role in their story.
For Hakodate, sitting at the
epicentre of these changes proved both a threat and opportunity. In
many ways it would gain from it: the foreign materials, equipment and
thinking that came piling onto its docks transformed it into a
laboratory of Japan's modernization, by which it learnt from European
and American ways to strengthen its own – and nowhere more so than
in the new drive to colonize Hokkaido through modern roads and
railways, modern farming, modern industry, modern science, and modern
institutionalized repression of indigenous people.
But it was also frightening,
reminding Hakodate of its front-row seat for competing great-power
hunger in these northern regions, and its vulnerability to foreign
aggression and domestic anger alike. And today, one of Hakodate's
leading attractions is a project bringing all these threads together:
by which the shogunate, worried its colonial magistrate's office
under Hakodate-yama was dangerously exposed, decided to move it
inland and build a mighty Western-style fort to protect it.
Goryokaku: “five-sided
fortification”. Completed in 1864, this was a prime example of
rangaku (蘭学)
or “Dutch learning”, by which European knowledge was studied and
applied for the improvement of, and in concert with, Japanese goals
and identity. Guarding the peninsula's broad neck, it was designed in
mind of the range and effects of foreign ships' cannons, and in turn
sought to send a statement that Japan was strong, was modern enough
to stand up to foreign barbarians, and that it was this city,
Hakodate, which led this roaring modernization from the front.
All that when its star-shaped
fortress inspiration came originally from Renaissance Italy,
resembling many similar structures all over the world – including,
understandably but to my surprise all the same, in the Guianas, or
specifically New Amsterdam in Dutch-controlled Suriname.
And at its centre, the
Magistrate's Office itself: for a time, the nerve centre from which
Japan directed the colonization of Hokkaido.
This is of course a
reconstruction, albeit a painstaking one. So what happened to the
original? Well, it wasn't foreign cannons that brought this fortress
low.
Japan cascaded into civil war, as
disaffected aristocrats and samurai – mostly from marginalized
southwestern domains like Chōshū, Satsuma and Tosa (now effectively
Yamaguchi, Kagoshima and Kōchi, respectively) – banded together to
throw the Tokugawa shogunate from power. Many had been aggrieved ever
since their harsh treatment after losing the Battle of Sekigahara in
1600, and their revolution restored direct political supremacy to the
Meiji Emperor (whereupon, of course, they stuffed all the important
offices with people from their provinces).
However, an alliance of Tokugawa
loyalists fought on, retreating north through Tōhoku as the imperial
forces pursued them. Rapidly running out of options, they packed onto
the remains of their fleet and escaped to Hakodate with their French
advisers, where they occupied the city, took the Goryokaku fort as
their base, and had this group photo taken as one always does on such occasions.
They were kind of doomed. They
tried to establish an independent Republic of Ezo to develop
Hokkaido, appealing to Hakodate's foreign consulates for
international recognition, and pleading with Japan's new imperial
government to let them rule the island as a shogunate remnant on the
emperor's behalf. But this was refused, and soon the imperial forces
came, sending commandos up the back of Hakodate-yama and digging in
round the city. At last they assaulted Goryokaku fort, where the
Tokugawa loyalists made their final stand. Their defeat and surrender
ended the war, completed the Meiji revolution, brought down the
curtain on two hundred and fifty years of Tokugawa rule, and raised
it on the era which laid the foundations of Japan today.
With the Battle of Hakodate
concluded, and later the rise of Sapporo, the magistrate's office
became redundant. What remained of it was torn down in 1871, with the
fort grounds eventually becoming a park. Later on they would restore
a replica of the office, and most recently of all build Goryokaku
Tower, giving visitors panoramic views across the region and
conferring upon them its history. Once built to scare the outsiders,
it now draws them in by the bus-load.
If one thing surprised me most,
it was the portrayal of those shogunate loyalists. They say that
history is written by the winners, and winners the last Tokugawa
authorities certainly weren't. They've been portrayed as weak,
ineffective, reactionary, cowardly under foreign pressure, repressive
and insensitive to their nation's angers and pains. But in today's
Hakodate, these final remnants of their time at the helm of Japan get
their stories told a lot more sympathetically – and downright
heroically.
This is Toshizō Hijikata, whose
stoic and sombre figure recurs on about two thirds of every leaflet,
wall and signboard in Goryokaku. From how he's presented, he comes
across as a kind of End-of-the-Shogunate Severus Snape; a talented
specialist fighter, mean-spirited, often as hard-hearted and violent
as his circumstances, but ultimately a courageous hero who fought
with loyalty to the last. A founder of the shogunate's Shinsengumi
special police in Kyoto, he fled with the loyalist fleet to Hakodate
and took part in its occupation and defence. When the imperial forces
attacked, he launched a desperate charge to recapture the city, but
was shot and killed as he rode into battle.
His valour, and that of the
others defeated in the Battle of Hakodate, is something Goryokaku
wants no-one to miss.
What should we read from these
portrayals? Evidently, human wars tend to be nasty affairs with
heroism and brutality alike on all sides participating. Is there
anything particularly Japanese about respecting those who lose with
honour, who fight to the end even when knowing they cannot win? Or is
this just part of our basic humanity, a recognition that you can
respect a person's courage and defiance of fear even if you disagree
with what they stand for? How much might it have to do with certain
later Japanese experiences, and in the light of that, how far is it a
good or bad thing?
There's no limit to how far we
can reflect on this, of course. But if there's one thing to take from
it, I would say it should be the reminder that there are always
multiple sides to every story. The winners have the duty to equally
accommodate the losers in the writing of history, because only by
understanding all different perspectives can any lessons be learnt.
And we can understand: because those are humans on the other
side, just like ourselves, and just like ourselves, they hurt when
they bleed.
And let nobody play politics with
this or think it applies more to some than others, or refers to
specific historical episodes. It doesn't. It applies equally to every
person, and every country, in every time.
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| And so does the appeal of this. |
A walk around the city attests
still more to the transformation. The foreign influences Hakodate was
forced to welcome, ended up an outstanding part of its identity it
still displays today. In that regard, it leads the way in
exemplifying that blend of inputs that came to define Hokkaido: and
aware of this, it has actively preserved a lot of that era's fixings.
For example, the red-brick
warehouses, now containing a bustling shopping centre...
...the 1910 Chinese Memorial
hall...
...the Old British Consulate...
...and the Old Public Hall, whose
construction and purpose as the ward assembly hall was a 100%
Japanese affair.
There are also churches,
including a Catholic church and Russian Orthodox church; a
foreigner's cemetery; and the city's venerable streetcar (tram)
network, which though modernized still runs a vintage tramcar for
tourists.
And here's a provocative pair of
present-day expressions of Japan's relationship with Russia, a
hundred years after their last major fisticuffs. The monument of
Japanese-Russian friendship; and an especially friendly board at the
top of the mountain.
The latter of course refers to
the Kuril Islands, the subject of a tiresome ownership squabble over
many decades. Topical, as in the very week of this trip, hours of TV
news time were devoted to separate island disputes between Japan and
each of its neighbours, one by one – mostly over uninhabited
rocks.
All these countries need to calm
down. These are islands: extensions of the Earth, and the Earth owns
itself. Hysterical nationalisms and swaggering political gestures
over such things discredit any nation expressing them, and will only
hurt everybody. What matters is to understand one another's
perspectives, and work with the aim of satisfying everybody – not
swinging the national genitals around with “tough, this is our land
and we're better than you”. The record of this whole region gives
nobody in it the right to get drunk on national pride.
My exploration turned into a
multi-mile hike beneath a merciless sun, all the way out to Cape
Tachimachi (from Ainu yokoushi, “the place where people
stand and catch fish”,) at Hakodate's southern tip.
The final order of business was
to take the ropeway up Hakodate-yama. I've mentioned the strategic
and historic qualities of the view from the top, but today it's the
commercial aspect that dominates. The panorama of Hakodate at night
is one of the world's most famous cityscapes: and thus the city
cashes in with a giant visitors' centre at the peak, complete with
shops, restaurant, aggressive souvenir-photo salesmen, and balconies
where hundreds of visitors at a time can crush themselves in like
sardines to watch Hakodate before the setting sun.
And so was Hakodate where I came
to the end of my own Hokkaido voyage – though I wonder if that
voyage itself may be just the beginning. Nonetheless, for now it was
time to head back south, to reflect on all I had found. Coming next:
the return leg of the journey down the east of Tōhoku, with a delve
into curious traditions in the woods and sulphur of deeper Miyagi.
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