Hakodate

At night Hakodate looks like a city poured between two seas. From the summit of Mount Hakodate the narrow isthmus glitters with streetlights that trace its hourglass waist, dark water on both sides — the view the city calls, without embarrassment, the million-dollar night view. Fog and wind sometimes take it away entirely, which is why people go up twice.

Hakodate was among the first Japanese ports opened to foreign trade in the 1850s after the country's long isolation, and the Motomachi district climbs the hill on stone-paved streets past the churches, former consulates and merchant houses the foreigners left behind. The morning market beside the station has more than three hundred stalls: live squid pulled from tanks and sliced on the spot, sea urchin split open, salmon roe spooned over rice, and a queue for the live squid fishing that everyone lines up to try. Goryōkaku, the first Western-style fortress in Japan, spreads its five-pointed star below an observation tower, and in May its moat is ringed with cherry blossom. Trams rattle between the red-brick warehouses on the bay and the old hot-spring quarter of Yunokawa, and the ropeway carries you up the mountain at dusk.