Hakodate
— — the harbour that lights itself at dusk.
Not only on a wall.
“A port city on the narrow neck of land where Hokkaido tapers into the Tsugaru Strait. The headland of Mount Hakodate climbs to 334 metres on the western side, and the city wraps around its base in a shape that reads, from the summit, like a fan dropped on dark water. In 1859 it was one of the first three Japanese ports opened to foreign trade, and the brick warehouses and clapboard consulates from that decade still stand along the Bay Area. The morning market sells squid pulled from the strait at dawn. The night view is held to be one of the three great night views of Japan. — from the studio
Hakodate, on ceramic.
Each tile is finished by hand in our Knoxville studio. Artwork is slowly infused into the ceramic surface under high heat and pressure, and rests beneath a thin glossy finish. The colour lives in the surface, not on top of it.
Pick any four 4-inch tiles — National Parks you've been to, a Smokies set, the four seasons of one place. $ for a set of , cork-backed, ready to live on the table.
The place, in three passes.
Hakodate sits at the southern tip of Hokkaido, on a narrow tombolo connecting the headland of Mount Hakodate to the main island. The city's 2024 population is roughly 240,000, making it the third largest in Hokkaido after Sapporo and Asahikawa. Along with Yokohama and Nagasaki, it was one of the first three Japanese ports opened to foreign trade by the 1858 Treaty of Amity and Commerce, with formal opening following on 2 June 1859. The Tsugaru Strait at its mouth separates Hokkaido from Honshu and is crossed by the Seikan Tunnel, the longest undersea rail tunnel in the world at 53.85 kilometres.
The night view from the 334-metre summit of Mount Hakodate is named with those from Mount Inasa over Nagasaki and Mount Rokkō over Kobe as one of the three great night views of Japan. The shape of the city, wrapping a narrow isthmus between Hakodate Bay and the Tsugaru Strait, makes a clean fan of light bordered on three sides by black water. A ropeway opened in 1958 carries visitors to the summit in three minutes; on a clear evening the queue forms an hour before sunset. The blue half-hour after the sun is gone is the moment the photographers wait for.
The Hokkaido Shinkansen reaches Shin-Hakodate-Hokuto in about four hours from Tokyo, with a local rapid train to Hakodate station in another twenty minutes. The morning market beside the station opens at 5 a.m. in summer and 6 a.m. in winter, and is best for grilled squid, sea urchin bowls, and the salmon roe pulled from the Tsugaru Strait fleet. The star-fort of Goryōkaku, completed in 1866, sits 3 kilometres east of the harbour and is ringed by about 1,600 cherry trees that bloom in the last week of April and the first week of May, two to three weeks later than Tokyo.