Photo: Tan Wei Liang Byorn / CC BY-SA 4.0Otaru is a harbour town of 100,000 in Hokkaido that for thirty years around 1900 was the richest town on the island, built on herring. Then the herring stopped coming, and what was left is unusually beautiful: a 1923 canal of stone warehouses and 63 gas lamps, stone banks, and glass workshops. Every call since 2024 has used No.3 Wharf, five to ten minutes' walk from the canal, with a whole street of sushi counters in the old town.
For a few decades either side of 1900, herring arrived on this coast in numbers that turned the sea white. Otaru became the financial centre of Hokkaido, built a street of stone banks, and then the fish simply did not come back.
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By 1966 the canal was a stagnant, foul-smelling relic of an industry that had ended, and the city proposed filling it in for a six-lane road. What followed was one of the first and fiercest citizens’ preservation campaigns in modern Japan, and it lasted more than a decade.
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Otaru’s glassworks were founded to make two things: floats to hold up herring nets, and oil lamps for a town with no electricity. Plastic killed the first and the power grid killed the second. The workshops survived by making things nobody needed at all.
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In 1918 a young Japanese chemist enrolled at Glasgow University to learn how whisky was actually made. He came home with a notebook, a Scottish wife, and a conviction that Japan’s whisky should be made somewhere cold and grey — which is why the distillery is twenty-five minutes from this port.
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Otaru has a street officially named Sushiya-dori and more sushi counters than a town of 100,000 has any right to. That ratio is not an accident of tourism — it is what happens when a fishing port gets rich and then stops being rich.
Read the story →Cruise seasons run spring to autumn, but the port changes underneath them.
Blossom reaches Hokkaido at the very end of the month. The canal is at its bleakest and emptiest just before.
Mild, dry, long daylight, and the first cruise calls. The best walking weather of the year.
Hokkaido has no rainy season worth the name. This is the quiet sweet spot.
Sea urchin season. Order it at Sankaku and do not economise.
Warm without the humidity of the main islands. Busy on Sakaimachi.
The clearest air of the year and the start of the autumn table.
Excellent walking, excellent seafood, and the coaches thin out.
Hair crab and scallop come into their own. Few ships.
Cruise season is over, but February floats candles on the canal. The best the town ever looks.
