Goryōkaku, and then Goryōkaku

The other day we went to Goryōkaku Park for the first time - which is crazy! - and had a great time. Then the next day was so clear with blue skies after like two weeks of gray, and we realized we had to go to Goryōkaku Tower to enjoy the weather!

I think it's worth starting with a little bit of history of Goryōkaku - not a ton, just enough so that the park makes sense.

If you're at all familiar with modern(ish) Japanese history, you'll know about how in the mid-19th century, Commodore Perry showed up to Japan with some warships and ordered them to open themselves to foreign trade. Hakodate was one of the two ports opened to foreigners, and when it was opened it kind of exploded into a flurry of development. They needed a new headquarters for their local government, but they wanted it to be fortified enough that a theoretical attack couldn't decapitate them, so they built a Star Fort a bit inland of the port. For a variety of reasons (mostly the fall of the shogunate), it dwindled in political importance very quickly, and after it was damaged at the end of the Boshin War the magistrate's office was demolished. After that, the fort just kind of collected dust until it became a park a few decades later.

And what a park it is!

We took this picture from the tower, the day after we visited the park.

Apparently, in the decades when fortress was unused, they collected ice from the moat in the winter, and sold it across Japan.

We'd visited a handful of Japanese castles, and Goryōkaku reminds us of them - but it's so much bigger and more spacious. It's so overgrown but in a wonderful, nature-is-beautiful kind of way that I wish more American parks would emulate. Like, there's whole fields of dandelions!

It was a cloudy day, but I love the look of clouds with mountains.

Inside the park is a modern recreation of the magistrate's office, built using all of the same techniques and materials that the original would've been built with. There's a documentary you can watch inside that explains that they were so committed to authenticity that they didn't even try to recreate it until they unearthed the original foundation and were able to confirm that the blueprints they had were the final blueprints used in its construction.

An old-school toilet - not to be used by the public!

The inside of the recreation is pretty barren of decoration, because they didn't have any records of what specific decorations would've been used.

The inner courtyard, apparently mostly used for collecting rainwater.

So like I said at the start of the post, we thought we were done there, but the next day the skies were so clear, we knew we had to go to Goryōkaku Tower and get some pictures from up there!

Okay, this one's not from up in the tower, but look how blue the moat looks when the weather's nice!