The opening of Japan

Commodore Perry came back in February 1854 with more ships, and on 31 March 1854 Japan signed the Treaty of Kanagawa. It opened exactly two ports: Shimoda, and Hakodate.

The reason is less romantic than the phrase "the opening of Japan" suggests. The American Pacific whaling fleet needed somewhere northern to take on water, coal and firewood, and to have shipwrecked sailors rescued rather than imprisoned. Hakodate was chosen as a provisioning stop. It became one of the two doors into a closed country almost by logistics.

Then the consuls arrived

The American was first: Elisha E. Rice, appointed in 1856 and in place by 1857, though formally titled a commercial agent for his first eight years. The Russian followed in late 1858 — Iosif Goshkevich, the first Russian diplomatic representative in Japan. The British opened in June 1859.

Full trade came with the Harris Treaty of 1858, and one of its clauses shaped this skyline directly: freedom of religious practice, and the right to build. Which is how a Russian church came to stand on a Japanese hillside.

The cradle of Japanese Orthodoxy

Goshkevich secured land in 1859, and a wooden chapel was consecrated in October 1860 as an annex to the Russian consulate — the first purpose-built Orthodox church in Japan. A young priest arrived the following year and used it as the base from which Orthodoxy was first preached in this country. He is now known as St. Nikolai of Japan, and this small building on a Hakodate slope is where the Japanese Orthodox Church begins.

It burned in the great fire of 1907. The present brick, Russo-Byzantine building — white walls, green roof — was completed in 1916 to a design by an Orthodox deacon, and became a National Important Cultural Property in 1983. Locals call it gangan-dera, the "ding-dong temple," for its bells, which are on Japan's official list of a hundred soundscapes worth preserving.

The real reason it looks Western

Here is the argument I have never seen made in English, and I think it is the true one.

Hakodate burned. Not once — 1879, 1907, and catastrophically on 21 March 1934, when roughly two-thirds of the city's buildings were destroyed. Almost everything "old" in Motomachi is therefore a rebuild, and each time the city rebuilt, it rebuilt in brick, stone and Western technique, because Western technique meant fire-resistant.

Hakodate is not Western because foreigners built it. It is Western because it kept burning down, and the West had the better fireproofing.

The Old Public Hall of 1910 — colonial yellow with blue-grey trim, a wide balcony over the bay — went up after the 1907 fire took the previous assembly hall. The Kanemori Red Brick Warehouses were rebuilt fireproof in 1909 after the same fire destroyed the wooden originals. The British Consulate you can visit dates to 1913, its predecessors having burned in 1863, 1879 and 1907.

And the older name underneath

The city was founded in 1454, when a Japanese lord built a box-shaped manor house in an Ainu fishing village called Usukeshi. Hako (box) plus tate (fort) gave the new name. Three years later, in 1457, the first great Ainu uprising began in this area.

So the most Western city in Japan is also a place whose Ainu name was written over in 1454, and it is worth carrying both facts up the hill together. The Ainu story continues there.