Goryōkaku
Interesting facts
- The site was once a willow-covered marsh, which earned the fort the alternative name Yanagino-jō, "willow-field castle".
- The design included five half-moon outworks, but budget cuts and a smaller foreign threat than feared meant that only one was ever built.
- The earth ramparts, built from soil dug out of the moat, stand about 7.5 metres high and 30 metres wide at the base, with gun platforms along the top.
- The moat is up to about 30 metres wide and some 1.8 km around; it was originally fed through buried wooden pipes from the Kameda River about a kilometre away.
- During the 1869 siege the defenders felled the fort's tall drum tower, fearing the government warship Kōtetsu was using it as an aiming point.
- The Ezo leaders surrendered on 18 May 1869, and Goryōkaku was handed over without any fighting inside its walls.
- From 1871 ice was cut from the frozen moat and sold on Honshu as a commercial product, a business that grew into a considerable local industry.
- The cherry trees were planted over ten years from 1913 by a Hakodate newspaper to mark its 10,000th issue, and some serve as the city's official blossom-forecast trees.
- The reconstructed magistrate's office was built with the same materials and techniques as the original, but fire-safety rules limited it to about 1,000 square metres.
- The first observation tower beside the fort, 60 metres high, opened in 1964 to mark a century since the fortress was built.
Why it is worth it
Goryōkaku is Japan's great star fort: a five-pointed citadel of ramparts and water in the middle of Hakodate, designed so that each bastion covers its neighbours with gunfire. It was drawn up in 1855 by Takeda Ayasaburō, a scholar of Western learning, after Hakodate had been opened to foreign ships, and it was built to European principles of artillery defence rather than on the model of a Japanese castle. Construction took seven years and was completed in 1866, only two years before the Tokugawa shogunate fell. Inside the star stood the shogunate's magistrate's office, the government seat for the region.
The fort had one brief, dramatic moment. After the shogunate collapsed, loyalist forces retreated to Hokkaido and in 1869 made Goryōkaku the headquarters of the short-lived Republic of Ezo. It became the stage for the week-long final battle of the Boshin War, after which the new imperial government took control of the north and Japan's civil war came to an end. The fort then lost its military purpose; it opened as a public park in 1914 and was designated a Special Historic Site in 1952.
The star is best understood from above, which is why the 107-metre Goryōkaku Tower stands beside it: from its observation decks the geometry of walls and moats is laid out like a drawing. At ground level the fort is quieter and greener. Some 1,600 cherry trees line the ramparts and moats, making it one of the loveliest blossom sites in Hokkaido, when the pink outline of the star is visible from the tower. At the centre stands the magistrate's office, partly reconstructed from archaeological research and old records and completed in 2010, restoring the building that once gave the fort its reason to exist.
Getting there
Goryōkaku lies within the city of Hakodate, about 3 km from the centre. From Hakodate Station, take the city tram to the Goryōkaku-kōen-mae stop and walk about ten minutes. Hakodate Airport (HKD) is about 6 km away, with buses to the Goryōkaku area.
On these lists
From the encyclopaedia
Goryōkaku is a star fort in the Japanese city of Hakodate on the island of Hokkaido. The fortress was completed in 1866. It was the main headquarters of the short-lived Republic of Ezo.
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