Hakodate: The Last Rest Day On The 2023 Journey To The East

“Life is to encounter, achieve enlightenment and end peacefully.” – Kamel Katsuichiro

On June 14, 1864 a young Japanese man in thirst of knowledge, particularly about foreign lands, got himself a little boat and secretly sailed to sea. This was against the law of the land, which prohibited foreigners from coming to Japan and for Japanese to leave the country. His name was Joseph Hardy Neesima and he sailed from Hakodate. This port on the south side of Hokkaido Island is where we arrived yesterday after several days of wonderful cycling through the wilds of Japan.

Joseph Hardy Neesima, Hakodate

It is also the location of the final rest day for the 2nd group of riders on the 2023 Journey to the East (The first group, being three days ahead, is closing in on the finish in Sapporo). Nowadays there is a monument to Niijima Jo, as Joseph is known in Japan, who eventually made it to the United States where he studied for ten years. During that period, things in Japan changed and Jo was allowed to return to Japan where he founded Doshisha University. Before that he wrote a poem in Hong Kong which is inscribed on the monument – “Man should run across thousands of miles with one’s resolution. I cannot yearn for the sight of my home without suffering from what I had done after the spring wind blowing or during the windy and rainy night. I still dream a dream of flowers in my hometown.”

I absorbed all of this and more on my rest day ‘walkabout’ in Hakodate, one of three Japanese ports that opened to trade after the US – Japan Amity treaty of 1854. That agreement brought prosperity to the small city but prosperity doesn’t come without some external help. I learned this when I visited a shrine which was originally built between 1861 and 1864 by townspeople – to worship the god of prosperity. My meandering among old brick warehouses that are now chic boutiques, former embassies, churches and government buildings brought me to the back side of a very large temple where I came upon the Kamel Katsuichiro aphorism quoted at the beginning of this blog. That made me think of the former government building which is now the Hakodate Museum of Northern Peoples.

Ainu artifacts

I learned about the indigenous people of the area, the Ainu, many of whom still live on Hokkaido and the surrounding islands. By the way, Kai in the name Hokkaido means ‘a person born in this country’. The exhibits which looked awfully familiar, no wonder considering it was less than a year ago that I had cycled in the Yukon on the 2022 North American Epic where I had my own encounters with the indigenous northern people of Canada.

Going back to Katsuichiro’s aphorism, while I have had plenty of encounters, achieving enlightenment is another thing completely, though God knows I have tried – even in places such as Madagascar and Nepal. Of course, there is always hope that one day, some place, somehow, it will come to me. In the meantime, there are still five days of cycling in Hokkaido before we reach the end of the tour in Sapporo, the site of the 1972 Winter Olympics and famous, among other things, for its Sapporo beer. If you haven’t tried it yet, do so. It may even enlighten your taste buds!

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