The most Western city in Japan

Hakodate makes a claim that other cities dispute: that it is the most Western city in Japan. The evidence is decent — one of the first two treaty ports in 1854, the first purpose-built Orthodox church in 1860, three consulates by 1859, Japan's first Western-style star fort. But the interesting version of the claim is not architectural. It is edible.

A restaurant that opened Russian

Gotoken was founded in 1879, making it one of the oldest continuously operating Western restaurants in Japan. And it opened serving Russian cuisine — not French, not English — because Hakodate had a Russian consulate and a Russian community, and that was the West that had actually arrived here.

The second generation trained at the Imperial Hotel and broadened the menu, and the house signature became an English-style curry. In 1989 the Emperor and Empress ate it, which made it famous nationally. The restaurant inside the main building operates in a designated Tangible Cultural Property.

The butcher the German navy rescued

Carl Raymon — a German-speaking butcher from Bohemia, then part of the Austro-Hungarian Empire — passed through Hakodate in 1919 on his way from America back to Europe, and met his wife here. He came back and in 1924–25 opened a ham and sausage business, one of the first authentic ones in Japan.

It failed almost immediately. Japanese customers had no habit of eating processed meat, and there was no market to build on.

What saved it was the German warships calling at Hakodate, whose crews ordered in bulk and gave the business both cash flow and reputation. A German sausage-maker in northern Japan was kept alive by the German navy's appetite.

He went on to build a three-thousand-square-metre factory and to promote livestock farming across Hokkaido — his influence on the island's dairy and meat industry probably outweighs his sausages. The Raymon House in Motomachi stands on the site of his old factory, sells the sausages, and keeps a free exhibition of his history upstairs.

The burger chain that will not expand

Lucky Pierrot opened in 1987 and has seventeen branches, all of them in the Hakodate area. That is deliberate policy, not a lack of ambition — the company has declined to become a national chain.

The bestseller is the Chinese Chicken Burger: three pieces of fried chicken in a sweet-savoury sauce, named Japan's best local hamburger by the Nikkei. It is Chinese-influenced because the founder had previously run a Chinese restaurant near Tokyo — which is how a Hokkaido burger chain ended up with a Cantonese signature item.

Every branch is decorated differently and all of them are gloriously, aggressively over-decorated. The whole operation is a deliberate refusal of the McDonald's model: local ingredients, no two rooms alike, no expansion.

And the shio ramen

Japan's three great ramen broths are miso, soy and salt — and shio, the clear salt broth, is Hakodate's. It is the lightest and the least forgiving, because there is nothing in the bowl to hide behind. Ajisai has been refining it here since 1930.

The night view, and the honest warning

Mount Hakodate is 334 metres, the ropeway takes three minutes, and the view from the top is one of Japan's three great night panoramas — the city pinched between two seas, lit like spilled jewellery. Best viewing is about thirty minutes after sunset.

The warning matters more than the description. From May to July this coast is frequently blanketed in sea fog, and travellers routinely pay, queue, ride up and see a grey blur. The ropeway ticket counter runs a live stream of the observation deck — check it before you buy, and if your ship sails before dark, take the daytime panorama instead and lose nothing you cannot live without.