Hakodate Travel Guide

The Hakodate Jōmon Culture Center is a museum and archaeology centre in Hakodate showing Jōmon-era finds from the area. Home to the National Treasure 'hollow clay figurine' among other fine dogū, it is the centre for Hokkaidō's Jōmon culture.

The Hakodate Chinese Cemetery (Chūka-sansō) is a historic cemetery building of 1893, built by the Chinese community of Hakodate and among the oldest surviving in Japan. Ming-Qing in style, it joins the port's and the community's histories.

The Hakodate Museum of Northern Peoples in Hakodate presents the life and culture of the Ainu and other northern peoples. Housed in the red-brick former Bank of Japan Hakodate branch, it holds dress, tools and household objects.

At the heart of one of Japan's oldest Chinatowns, Hakodate's Chinese Hall is the only original hall of the local Chinese community still in use. Its vermilion multi-tiered roof, upturned eaves and painted beams stand out against Hakodate's townscape, recalling the late-19th-century boom when Chinese settlers thrived after the port opened alongside Yokohama and Nagasaki. Still fragrant with incense, it comes alive with dragon dances at Lunar New Year.

Uomi-zaka is a steep slope in Hakodate, named because from the top one could once look down into the bay and even see fish swimming (the water is no longer that clear). The short stone-paved incline links the Motomachi hillside with the lower town and is a classic vantage point over Hakodate Port and the ferry route to Aomori — a quiet stop on any Motomachi church-and-slope walk.

Koryuji is a Jodo-sect temple in Hakodate's Motomachi district, its gate and main hall a calm, solemn note among the old stone lanes. It has kept the devotional thread of a port city where Japanese, Chinese and Western faiths long mixed. The vermilion gate posts and stone steps make an easy pause on a neighbourhood walk.