Day 7, Morioka and Kakunodate

As I wrote in “Day 6”, I arrived in Morioka very early. It was 8 o’ clock when I entered my next ryokan, Kumagai. It had been quite a search, because none of the maps I had (including the map in my one year old Lonely Planet guide) showed a new bridge that had recently been completed. So it was early, and I hadn’t shown up on the first day of my reservation, but none of this was a problem. The woman that runs the ryokan was quite relaxed, and thought the whole shinkansen adventure was kind of funny. The inn itself was a very atmospheric, creaky wooden building.

It happened to be a Sunday. It is funny how you can completely lose track of the weekdays when traveling. I just made my regular round: first the Tourist Information Centre, which can always be found at the station, to ask about the local sights, then to the ticket centre to get seat reservations for the trip to my next destination, and finally a bench to sit down and decide which sights to see in Morioka.

Morioka, with its 300 thousand inhabitants, is a much smaller town than Sapporo. For some reason, Japanese cities always feel much smaller than they really are. A city like Sapporo feels as large as for example Amsterdam, but is in fact twice as large. And Morioka feels like a middle-sized town in the Netherlands, but is several times larger. This feeling of size is based on the size of the station / shopping district / entertainment district / etc. Maybe it can be explained by the fact that every Japanese city has enormous suburbs. These pump up the population size, but don’t add to the image of a city.

Anyway, Morioka used to be a so-called castle town, where during the feudal shogunate era (the shogun was the most powerful warrior, who ruled Japan from Tokyo) the local ruler built his castle. Many of the castles in Japan got destroyed during the Meiji Restoration. This restoration took place at the end of the 19th century, when an alliance of southern samurai clans rebelled against the Shogun and gave power back to the emperor (who had been living in Kyoto all the time). Later in this journey I will visit some castles that have survived the restoration or have been reconstructed, but of Morioka’s castle only ruins are left. They form the heart of the central park. Because the castle used to be built on a small hill, you have quite nice views over Morioka. Besides these ruins, there is very little to see in Morioka. They do have a cherry tree that supposedly split a rock, but if a city is depending on that for its attractions… And judging by the size of the rock, the truth behind the story is questionable as well.

Because I had enough time left, I took a shinkansen to Kakunodate for some more feudal history. This too used to be a castle town, positioned to the west of Morioka. Its exact placement was strategically chosen, as it was surrounded on three sides by mountains, and by plains on the fourth side. To get to the castle from the plains, one had to go through the samurai district. In this district the warriors that served the local ruler lived. In the past it contained more than 80 houses. The nice thing about Kakunodate is that large parts of the district (the layout and about 12 houses) have survived until this day. Even 15 years ago, descendants of the original families still lived in some of the houses. Nowadays, most of the houses are open to the public, and the whole area feels as an open-air samurai museum. Despite the hordes of tourists that swamp the area, it still has a nice authentic atmosphere, and shows a little bit of ‘old Japan’. See photos. Funny was also that the artist that drew the first Japanese anatomy book (copied from a Dutch book) lived in Kakunodate. Later, he also introduced ‘akita-ranga’ (Akita-Dutch painting, using shadows and perspective) in Japan. This made him very popular among the rulers of Japan at the time.