Hakodate Park

Hakodate Park: A Citizen-Built Garden at the Foot of Mount Hakodate

On 3 November 1879, a few thousand residents of Hakodate gathered on the lower slopes of Mount Hakodate to mark the opening of a park they themselves had built. Merchants had emptied their savings, fire brigades had volunteered weekends to shift earth, and Buddhist temple parishioners had been mobilized by their priests to plant trees. Even the city's geisha had taken their turn carrying baskets. The result was a 4.8-hectare landscape of artificial hills, ponds and footpaths overlooking the Tsugaru Strait—the first Western-style public park in Hokkaido, and to this day one of the most unusual urban parks in the country.

In January 2006, Hakodate Park was entered on Japan's national register of monuments under the scenic-site category. It was one of only three properties named in that inaugural batch, the very first sites added when the registered monument scheme came into force under the 2004 amendment to the Cultural Properties Protection Law.

The British Consul Who Persuaded a Port City

In 1873 the Meiji government issued an edict urging populated districts to set aside land for public parks. Most cities responded by repurposing temple precincts or feudal pleasure grounds. Hakodate had neither. A young port town with no obvious site for such a thing, it might simply have ignored the order.

What changed matters was a foreigner. Richard Eusden, then British consul in Hakodate, was in the habit of arguing that "just as the sick need hospitals, the healthy need places to rest." His campaign for a park took years to gather support, but eventually it persuaded Watanabe Kumashiro, a prominent local merchant whose name still appears on storefronts in the old town, to put up the seed money. Other shipowners and wholesalers followed. By 1878 enough had been raised to begin work.

The hands that did the digging belonged to ordinary residents. Officials of the Hakodate sub-prefecture spent their days off hauling soil to form the central mound. Neighbourhood associations sent volunteers in shifts. The Buddhist temples called on their parishioners; the fire brigades sent crews; the geisha and entertainers of the licensed quarters joined in too. The site engineer Asada Seijiro coordinated the work. A Hakodate haiku poet, Kozandō Mugai, took up residence inside the park as its first warden. Five months before the official opening, the temporary museum hall built into the grounds—the Kaitakushi Provisional Museum Hall—threw open its doors as well.

Why a Park Became a National Monument

The Agency for Cultural Affairs cites three reasons for registering Hakodate Park. The first is the participatory nature of its construction: nothing quite like the volunteer movement behind it exists elsewhere in Japan's early park history. The second is the cluster of cultural institutions that grew up inside it almost from the start—the Provisional Museum of 1879, a second museum building added in 1884, the city library that arrived in 1928, and Hokkaido's first public zoo enclosure, built within the grounds in 1938. The third is that the early Meiji layout—the circular plaza in the eastern half, the stone-banked stream running through the centre, the small arched bridge known as Shirakawa Bridge, and the stone lanterns scattered through the grounds—still survives, in some places almost intact.

That survival is unusual. Most nineteenth-century Japanese parks have been re-landscaped at least once, often beyond recognition. At Hakodate Park you can still walk the same paths, cross the same bridge, and read the same stone markers that the 1879 visitors would have known.

What to Look For

The Twin Museum Halls

Two small wooden Western-style buildings stand near the centre of the park, painted pale and looking very much like something transplanted from a New England town. The earlier one, the former Hakodate Museum No. 1, dates from 1879 and is considered the oldest surviving Western-style wooden museum building in Japan. Its companion, No. 2, was completed in 1884 and is distinguished by arched window heads and a slightly more refined exterior. Both are designated tangible cultural properties of Hokkaido. The interiors are normally closed, but No. 1 is opened to the public on the Saturday nearest 25 May each year, the anniversary of its founding.

Japan's Oldest Working Ferris Wheel

Tucked among the trees in the small fairground called Kodomonokuni stands a ten-metre-tall ferris wheel of unmistakable mid-century vintage. Eight bench-style gondolas hang from a wheel of welded angle-iron arranged in an octagon rather than a circle—a strange and rather lovely shape, in the way that pre-mass-production engineering often is. It was built in 1950 for an amusement ground beside Lake Onuma, half an hour from Hakodate by train, and moved to the park in 1965. In 2019 it was registered as a national tangible cultural property, the only ferris wheel in Japan to hold that status. Each ride takes about three minutes and forty-five seconds, the gondolas pausing as passengers board and alight. From the top, between the leaves, you catch a sliver of the Tsugaru Strait.

The Stone Bridge and the Old Pines

Shirakawa Bridge, a low arch of cut stone over the park's central watercourse, is the oldest Western-style stone bridge in Hokkaido. Nearby, two large black pines bear plaques identifying them as the Takadaya Pines—transplanted from the garden of Takadaya Kahei, an early-nineteenth-century shipping magnate who shaped much of Hakodate's early economy. In 1972 the pines were registered as Hokkaido Heritage Protected Trees.

Cherry Blossoms

About 360 Somei-Yoshino cherry trees are planted across the grounds. The bloom usually arrives in late April; in recent years the opening date has been creeping earlier, and the park is busiest in the four or five days after the trees reach full flower. Food stalls line the central plaza during the festival, and at night the trees are lit until nine. From the small observation pavilion called Surubachi-yama you can look down over the cherries to the flight-tower of the children's fairground and, beyond, to the sea.

Practical Information for Visitors

The park is open year-round and free to enter. The small zoo within the grounds keeps shorter hours, especially in winter, and the fairground Kodomonokuni closes from late November to mid-March. Most rides cost 350 yen, with a day pass available. The Hakodate City Museum, opened inside the park in 1966 as the institutional descendant of the original 1879 museum, charges a modest admission and rotates exhibits on prehistory, the Bakumatsu wars, the local Ainu collection, and Hakodate's port history.

The simplest way in is by the city tram. From Hakodate Station, take Line 2 to Aoyagi-chō stop (about ten minutes) and walk three minutes uphill. Hakodate Bus route 53 also serves a stop called Hakodate-kōen directly outside the gate. Parking is severely limited—four spaces, reserved for visitors with disabilities—so during cherry-blossom season the city opens an overflow lot at nearby Sumiyoshi Park.

In the Surrounding Neighbourhood

Hakodate Park sits in the older, southern part of the city, an area that rewards unhurried walking. Yachigashira Onsen, a public bathhouse fed by a hot spring on the lower flank of the mountain, lies a short walk to the south and offers a five-pointed star-shaped outdoor pool, an unusual local quirk. The Motomachi historic district—where Russian, Chinese and Western European communities once lived side by side and built the churches that still define the skyline—is fifteen minutes downhill on foot or one stop on the tram. The base station of the Mount Hakodate Ropeway is also within walking distance, making the park a sensible afternoon stop before going up to see the celebrated night view of the harbour.