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Hakodate (函館市, Hakodate-shi?) is a city and port located in Oshima, Hokkaidō, Japan. It is the capital city of Oshima Subprefecture.

As of March 2008, the city has an estimated population of 287,691 and a density of 442.24 persons per km². The total area is 677.77 km².

History of Hakodate

Hakodate was founded in 1454, when Kono Kaganokami Masamichi constructed a large manor house in the Ainu fishing village of Usukeshi (the word for bay in Ainu). The mansion is said to have included a barricade and looked like a box from the distance giving the area its name, box mansion.[1]

After his death, Masamichi's son, Kono Suemichi, and family were driven out of Hakodate into nearby Kameda during Ainu rebellion in 1512 and little history was recorded for the area during the next 100 years. There was constant low level conflict in the Oshima peninsula at the time with the Ainu as armed merchants like the Kono family established bases to control trade in the region. This conflict culminated in an uprising from 1669 to 1672, led by Ainu warrior Shakushain after which the Ainu in the region were suppressed.[2]

Hakodate flourished during the Hoei period (1704–11) and many new temples were founded in the area. The town's fortunes received a further boost in 1741 when the Matsumae clan, which had been granted nearby areas on the Oshima Peninsula as a march fief, moved its Kameda magistracy to Masamichi's house in Hakodate.

In 1779, the Tokugawa shogunate took direct control over Hakodate, which triggered rapid development in the area. Merchant Takadaya Kahei, who is honoured as the founder of Hakodate port, set up trading operations, which included the opening the northern Etorofu sea route to the Kuril island fisheries. He is credited with turning Hakodate from a trading outpost into a thriving city. A Hakodate magistracy was established in 1802.[3]
Meiji restoration

The port of Hakodate was surveyed by a fleet of five U.S. ships in 1854 under the conditions of the Treaty of Kanagawa, as negotiated by Commodore Matthew Perry.

Hakodate port partially opened to foreign ships for provisioning in the following year and then completely to foreign trade on 2 June 1859 as one of three Japanese open ports designated in the 1858 Treaty of Amity and Commerce signed with the U.S.

A mariner in Perry's fleet died during a visit to the area and became the first U.S. citizen to be buried in Japan when he was interred in Hakodate's cemetery for foreigners.

British merchant, naturalist and spy, Thomas Blakiston, took up residence in Hakodate in the summer of 1861 to establish a saw milling business and in doing so acquainted the city with western culture. He stayed in Hakodate until 1884, during which time he documented the local natural environment, equipped the local meteorological station and ran guns to the Boshin War rebels.[4]

As one of few points of Japanese contact with the outside world, Hakodate was soon host to several overseas consulates. The Russian consulate included a chapel from where Nicholas of Japan is credited with introducing Eastern Orthodox Christianity to Japan in 1861 (now the Japanese Orthodox Church). The Orthodox church is neighbored by several other historical missionary churches, including Anglican and Catholic.

Hakodate also played a central role in the Boshin War between the Tokugawa shogunate and the Meiji Emperor which followed Perry's opening of Japan. Shogunate rebel Enomoto Takeaki fled to Hakodate with the remnants of his navy and his handful of French advisers in winter 1866, including Jules Brunet. They formally established the Republic of Ezo on December 25. The republic tried unsuccessfully to gather international recognition to foreign legations in Hakodate, including the Americans, French, and Russians.

The rebels occupied Hakodate's famous European-style Goryokaku fort and used it as the centre of their defences in southern Hokkaidō. Government forces defeated the secessionists in the Battle of Hakodate in 1869 and the city and fort were surrendered to emperor. Military leader, Hijikata Toshizo, was one of those slain in the fighting.

In 1878, Isabella Bird reported of the city in her travelogue:

The streets are very wide and clean, but the houses are mean and low. The city looks as if it had just recovered from a conflagration. The houses are nothing but tinder... Stones, however, are its prominent feature. Looking down upon it from above you see miles of grey boulders, and realise that every roof in the windy capital is “hodden doun” by a weight of paving stones.

[edit] 20th century to present day

Hakodate was awarded city status on August 1, 1922. The city escaped most of the ravages of World War II. Areas around Hakodate-yama were fortified and access restricted to the public. Many prisoners of war were interned in Hakodate and historians record a total of 10 camps.[5] The city was subjected to two Allied bombing raids on 14 and 15 July 1945. Around 400 homes were destroyed on the western side of Hakodate-yama and an Aomori-Hakodate ferry was attacked with 400 passengers killed.


Hakodate's size nearly doubled on December 1, 2004 when the neighboring municipalities of Toi, Esan and Todohokke (from Kameda District) and Minamikayabe (from Kayabe District) were merged into it.

One of the largest zoos in Hokkaido, it houses about 1,000 mammals, birds and reptiles of 200 species.

The zoo is the only one with a gorilla in Hokkaido. There's a bear house, where seven species of bear can be seen. The chimpanzee house has a 15-m-high jungle gym so that visitors can watch their behavior. Monkey Mountain is popular, as is the petting zoo of sheep and goats.

At Maruyama Kids' Land in the zoo, children can ride the Loop & Cork and the Viking. Kids' Land is popular among children and adults alike.

Address: Miyagaoka 3-1, Chuo-ku, Sapporo
Hours: 9AM – 5PM from Feb. through Oct.
9AM – 4PM from Nov. through Jan.
Last admission 30 min. before closing.
Closed: Dec 29 - 31
Admission: 600 yen for adults
Access: From Maruyama Koen Subway Sta.(Tozai Line), take the “Nishi #15 Dobutsuen-sen” JR Hokkaido Bus to the Dobutsuen-mae bus stop, or walk 15 minutes.
Note: Taxi fare is about 1,500 yen from Sapporo Sta.
Parking: Pay parking is available.
Contact: 011-621-1426 (Maruyama Zoo)

Fukuzawa Yukichi (福澤 諭吉 ?, January 10, 1835 – February 3, 1901) was a Japanese author, writer, teacher, translator, entrepreneur and political theorist who founded Keio University. His ideas about government and social institutions made a lasting impression on a rapidly changing Japan during the Meiji Era. He is regarded as one of the founders of modern Japan.


Fukuzawa Yukichi was born into an impoverished low-ranking samurai family of the Okudaira Clan of Nakatsu in 1835. His family was poor following the early death of his father. At the age of 14, Fukuzawa entered a school of Dutch studies (rangaku). In 1853, shortly after Commodore Matthew C. Perry's arrival in Japan, Fukuzawa's brother (the family patriarch) asked Fukuzawa to travel to Nagasaki, where the Dutch colony at Dejima was located. He instructed Fukuzawa to learn Dutch so that he might study European cannon designs and gunnery.

Although Fukuzawa did travel to Nagasaki, his stay was brief as he quickly began to outshine his host in Nagasaki, Okudaira Iki. Okudaira planned to get rid of Fukuzawa by writing a letter saying that Fukuzawa's mother was ill. Seeing through the fake letter Fukuzawa planned to travel to Edo and continue his studies there because he knew he would not be able to in his home domain, Nakatsu, but upon his return to Osaka, his brother persuaded him to stay and enroll at the Tekijuku school run by physician and rangaku scholar Ogata Kōan. Fukuzawa studied at Tekijuku for three years and became fully proficient in the Dutch language. In 1858, he was appointed official Dutch teacher of his family's domain, Nakatsu, and was sent to Edo to teach the family's vassals there.

The following year, Japan opened up three of its ports to American and European ships, and Fukuzawa, intrigued with Western civilization, traveled to Kanagawa to see them. When he arrived, he discovered that virtually all of the European merchants there were speaking English rather than Dutch. He then began to study English, but at that time, English-Japanese interpreters were rare and dictionaries nonexistent, so his studies were slow.

The Shogun decided to send envoys to the United States, and Fukuzawa volunteered his services to Admiral Kimura Yoshitake. Kimura's ship, the Kanrin Maru, arrived in San Francisco, California in 1860. The delegation stayed in the city for a month, during which time Fukuzawa had himself photographed with an American girl (one of the most famous photographs in Japanese history), and also found a Webster's Dictionary, from which he began serious study of the English language.

Upon his return in 1860, Fukuzawa became an official translator for the Tokugawa bakufu. Shortly thereafter he brought out his first publication, an English-Japanese dictionary which he called "Kaei Tsūgo" (translated from a Chinese-English dictionary) which was a beginning for his series of later books. In 1862, he visited Europe as one of the two English translators in bakufu's 40-man embassy, the First Japanese Embassy to Europe. During its year in Europe, the Embassy conducted negotiations with France, England, Holland, Prussia, and finally Russia. In Russia, the embassy unsuccessfully negotiated for the southern end of Sakhalin (in Japanese Karafuto).

The information collected during these travels resulted in his famous work Seiyō Jijō (西洋事情, "Things western"), which he published in ten volumes in 1867, 1868 and 1870. The books describe western culture and institutions in simple, easy to understand terms, and they became immediate best-sellers. Fukuzawa was soon regarded as the foremost expert on all things western, leading him to conclude that his mission in life was to educate his countrymen in new ways of thinking in order to enable Japan to resist European imperialism.

In 1868 he changed the name of the school he had established to teach Dutch to Keio Gijuku, and from then on devoted all his time to education. While Keiō's initial identity was that of a private school of Western studies (Keio-gijuku), it expanded and established its first university faculty in 1890. Under the name Keio University, it became a leader in Japanese higher education.

Ichiyō Higuchi (樋口 一葉 ,Higuchi Ichiyō?, May 2, 1872 – November 23, 1896) is the pen name of Japanese author Natsu Higuchi (樋口 奈津 ,Higuchi Natsu?), also known as Natsuko Higuchi (樋口 夏子 ,Higuchi Natsuko?).

Higuchi was born in Meiji era Tokyo of samurai lineage. In the space of her short life, she moved a total of 12 times. Upon reaching the age of 14, she entered the Haginoya, a poetry school; at the age of 15, she suffered the loss of her brother, and her father's business failed. Shortly afterward, he died and at the young age of 17 she became the head of the Higuchi household. Along with her mother and younger sister, they made ends meet by doing needlework, washing, and other jobs. After seeing the success of a classmate who wrote a novel, Higuchi decided to become a writer to support her family.

At the age of 20, Higuchi wrote her first novel and also adopted the pen name of Ichiyō. Around this time, Higuchi turned down a marriage proposal and moved to a house near the Yoshiwara pleasure quarters. In 1894 her first major work, Ōtsugomori (大つごもり ?, "The New Year's Eve") was published, and in the following year, Takekurabe, Nigorie (にごりえ ?, "Troubled Waters"), and Jūsan'ya (十三夜 ?, "The Thirteenth Night") were published to critical and popular success. Higuchi's literary career was cut short in 1896, when she contracted, and soon died of, tuberculosis.

In spite of her very short career and limited output, Higuchi is remembered for the quality of her works and is considered to be the first professional female writer in modern Japanese literature. Higuchi's likeness adorns the Japanese 5000 yen banknote as of fall, 2004, becoming the third female to appear on a Japanese banknote, after Empress Jingū in 1881, and Murasaki Shikibu in 2000. Next to Empress Jingū, she is the second woman whose face is featured prominently on a Japanese banknote.

Hideyo Noguchi (野口 英世 ,Noguchi Hideyo?, November 24, 1876 – May 21, 1928), also known as Seisaku Noguchi (野口清作 ,Noguchi Seisaku?), was a prominent American-based Japanese bacteriologist who discovered the agent of syphilis in 1911.

Noguchi Hideyo was born in Inawashiro, Fukushima prefecture in 1876. When he was one and a half years old he fell down into a fireplace and suffered a burn injury on his left hand. There was no doctor in the small village, but one of the men examined the boy. "The fingers of the left hand are mostly gone," he said, "and the left arm and the left foot and the right hand are burned; I know not how badly."

In 1883 he entered Mitsuwa elementary school. Thanks to generous contributions from his teacher Kobayashi and his friends, he was able to receive surgery on his badly burned left hand. He recovered about 70% mobility and functionality in his left hand through the operation.

Noguchi decided to become a doctor to help those in need. He apprenticed himself to Dr. Kanae Watanabe (渡部鼎 ,Watanabe Kanae?), the same doctor who had performed the surgery on his hand. He passed the examinations to practice medicine when he was twenty years old in 1897. He showed signs of great talent and was supported in his studies by Dr. Morinosuke Chiwaki. In 1898, he changed his first name to Hideyo after reading a fictional novel about a doctor who had the same name - Seisaku - as him. The doctor in the novel was intelligent like Noguchi, but became lazy and ruined his life.