Exploring a SNOWY Hakodate: Morning Market and Fort Goryokaku in the Winter

Part 2 of Journey North East! We wake up in the Southern Hokkaido city of Hakodate to find it covered in snow. With half a day to enjoy the frosty winterscape, we explore Hakodate’s Morning Market, and the iconic Fort Goryokaku, covered in white. After lunch, we head down south to Aomori, where we checked out the very cool Nebuta festival museum.

A full day in Aomori continues in the next video in the series. Subscribe and stay tuned!

Series playlist (updated as videos get posted):

Music from:
Epidemic Sounds

CAMERA
– Sony ZV-E10
LENSES
– Sony 18-135mm F3.5-5.6 OSS
– Sigma 30mm F1.4
– Sony 11mm F1.8
– Sony 55-210mm F4.5-6.3 OSS

EDITED with the FOSS video editor https://kdenlive.org/

When we awoke, the world was different. Despite what the weather reports says, we have a nice, little fresh layer of snow this morning. The frigid dryness the day before had, overnight, crystallized… into fine snow, coating everything in silver. It was the second day of our journey exploring north-eastern Japan,

And while we would have to leave Hakodate later today, we were still excited to have a half day ahead – for a wintery Hokkaido experience. Beautiful day so far, unless this kid jinxes it again. By beautiful day I really just meant it wasn’t as harrowingly windy as the day before,

Making it more bearable for us to be outside in the snow. Alright so… We are heading to the morning market, where we hope to get some nice tidbits to eat. Just a stone’s throw away from the train station. Hakodate’s morning market sells fresh local seafood,

Both as produce and in ready to eat forms, a good place for breakfast. So that is.. crab meat manju. It has a crab flavor to it, not bad. Nice and warm! So this is urchin – “Uni”, which is something that Hokkaido is famous for, so it looks pretty good. Nice and creamy.

That is excellent! They say Uni in Hokkaido is a different class, and well it was. So the shopkeeper just showed us this, which is the original urchin.. And apparently this is the mouth of the urchin? Very interesting! So presumably that’s how the urchin looks when you open it up.

It kind of looks like a fruit. These persimmons are also surprisingly good. Very sweet. Mom’s favorite. Man, the urchin, the Uni, is like a different tier from anything we’ve had back home, so that was really something. So I wanted some of these. Yubari melons. Wow. It’s really soft and juicy. And very street.

Melons may seem like an odd item in a seafood market, but Yubari are specialty of Hokkaido and they are delicious. In a seating area inside one of the buildings, we finished our morning’s foraging with a sashimi rice bowl and warm seafood ramen. That was breakfast, lots of random stuff we ate.

We are now going to head to Goryokaku, which is a… well I’ll show you when we get there. So Goryokaku is apparently a fortress that was used a couple of centuries ago. It’s got a very distinct star-like shape.

It is most famous in the spring, but in the winter, especially in a day like this, covered in snow – it should still be pretty good. So this tower, I think, is a tower that overlooks the fortress. It gives you a bird’s eye view.

We are going to go up there and take a look. So I think this fortress, Goryokaku, is also the final stand of the Shinsengumi back in the day. If you’ve seen some of my previous videos, you may remember a certain Hijikata Toshizo, his face is on the wall.

Also adorning the wall was the visage of a certain Commodore Perry – also introduced in a previous video. So this is actually kind of impressive. You get to see the fort. It also covers a much wider view than I expected. This striking star shaped structure is an actual 19th century fort,

And saw action in the final days of the Boshin War. Apparently, star forts are an actual category of fortifications. There’s even a view of the sea. It’s basically kind of a 360 degree panorama. Not bad! Milk soft serve. Hokkaido milk is supposed to be really good. This is good.

So there was like Santa Claus hanging off of the tower there. Kinda funny. We ended up spending more time than expected on the tower, and it was time to leave. That pretty much ends the Hokkaido leg of our trip. After this, we’ll be taking a train down under the water

Back to Aomori, which is where we will spend the night. So this is “Zangi”, which is supposedly like a Hokkaido style karaage. Pretty good. We are presumably under water again. Can’t see a thing! Okay, this is Shin-Aomori Station. We still have a transfer left to Aomori station itself.

But meanwhile, take a look at this interesting… floats or something. Okay, here we are. Aomori station. I’ve never been here in my life. Always wanted to come here and take a look. So as usual, we’re going to go check in first to get rid of all this luggage,

And then we’ll walk around a bit after that. There’s no sign of snow on the ground. Just kind of a wetness. I think it probably snowed early in the morning and then it melted across the day. Alright, so brief rest. We got this pretty retro, but otherwise pretty nice room.

Connecting, so we’ve got two bathrooms. Alright, we are out and about. We’re heading to the museum. There’s a very interesting looking building at the back there. Some pyramidal structure. We’ll probably check that out at some point. Alright, here we are. I think this is the Nebuta Warasse Museum.

Hopefully they let me film in there. But yeah. While the Aomori Nebuta Festival is a summertime spectacle, this museum ensures the elaborate warrior lantern floats can be enjoyed year-round. Surprisingly, I was welcome to film. The smiling staff handed us our reasonably priced tickets. And in we go. It’s pretty interesting, I think.

You basically have kind of a frame made out of like… wires maybe. And then you stick papers on it, kind of like lanterns. And also kind of analogous, I think, to polygons with computer graphics. You can make such a impressive looking stuff with it. These were built for the festival this year,

Which was of course earlier in the year. If you read the write-ups, they kind of evoke mythology and also current events as well. It’s quite interesting. An interesting feature as well is that you could kind of walk all around the float 360 degrees, and there are different things to see,

Depending on which angle you’re looking at it from. Okay, that was a pretty nice museum, I would say. We are now heading next door to A factory, which probably stands for Apple Factory. Aomori of course is known for Apple and this place presumably sells Apple products, so we’re going to take a look.

So this is sort of a tasting bar. I’ve gotten a little bit of Aomori Apple Cider here. Gonna give it a taste.. That’s nice. Sweet. So we bought a whole bunch of Apple themed stuff. Now it’s just time to go get a hearty dinner, and then retire for the day.

And this is my favorite – horse sashimi. This is this stuff. This is some kind of rice with crab and tofu. It’s got a very nice, fragrant crab flavor. It’s pretty good. As expected this was excellent. Izakayas for the win! This one has a very sharp flavor.

It says something about using the autumn harvest from this year. I didn’t like this one as much. This one is a lot sweeter and pleasant by my books. I like this one. Okay, so I think these are processed in a different way. So this one, the one with the stronger flavor,

This one is “straight”, apparently. So it’s kind of the first harvest of the fall. and then just squeeze it directly, no further processing and they bottle it. And that’s this one. And this one, the one that I like better, the one with the sweeter flavor, has a more elaborate process,

Where I don’t know, I think it’s like, diced up while not in contact with air, something like that. Draws out the flavor a bit more, maybe. But yeah, I mean, it tastes good. I like this one. So day two ends here in Aomori. A prefecture hitherto unknown to me.

Up next, I have a bad hair day as the weather turns blustery, and our full day in Aomori covers a unique market breakfast experience, a cool ship museum, a castle in the park, and ridiculously good apple pie. Subscribe and join us! As the Journey continues.