Otaru Travelogue Part 2: The Whisky I Cannot Drink
On June 2nd, I left the hotel shortly after 7:00 AM. It was cloudy with occasional sunshine. I decided to skip breakfast at the inn and spend about two hours walking around the city.
I walked down Chuo-dori toward the sea and turned onto Iro-nai O-dori. Commercial buildings and warehouses built from the end of the Meiji era to the beginning of the Showa era remain on every street. Many are made of stone, and the color of their walls looked different depending on how the morning light hit them. One building even had a large shachihoko (mythical carp) on its roof. The former Oya Warehouse along the North Canal is said to be among the oldest of them all.
I crossed the Tsukimi Bridge leading to Ishikari Bay, and when I reached the vicinity of Asahi Bridge, I was startled by a sudden siren at 7:30 AM. It was the warning bell for the Hokkai Seikan Otaru Factory. I heard it is the only can manufacturing factory left in Otaru.
The fact that sounds announcing the time still remain in the city is because people are still working there.
The water in the canal was still, and seagulls were lined up on the roof of a warehouse. At the fisheries cooperative wholesale market, Atka mackerel and giant Pacific octopus were being unloaded. I watched for a while from outside the 'No Entry' sign. I could hear the sound of carts and running water.
On the way, I found a shop called Ameya Rokubei Honpo. The company was founded in 1918, but the founder started as a candy maker in Toyama during the Edo period and moved to Otaru in 1891. The candy they gave me as a free sample had a nostalgic, clean, and elegant sweetness, so I bought some as a souvenir. The Misono Ice Cream shop next door was also founded in 1919 and is said to be the first shop to produce ice cream in Hokkaido.
The idea of moving from Toyama to Otaru might seem abrupt, but it is not. Since the days of the Kitamaebune ships, travel between the Hokuriku region and Ezo (Hokkaido) was frequent. That morning, a notice explaining this was posted in the window of the Hokuriku Bank Otaru Branch that I passed by. Both the bank's name and the shop's lineage are on the same sea route.
I came out to the site of the former Temiya Line. In 1880, a railway for coal transport was laid between Temiya and Sapporo, and the port of Otaru saw an increase in cargo handling. Since transshipping to barges offshore could not keep up, the Otaru Canal was dug so that barges could enter right up to the warehouses, and it was completed in 1923. That Temiya Line also finished its role and was abolished in 1985. Now, only the tracks remain among the grass.
For breakfast, I had a melon pan, an apple jam pan, and a Soft Katsugen I bought at a local Seicomart. Soft Katsugen is a Hokkaido-exclusive drink that the locals love, and when I tried it, it tasted similar to Yakult. I spread them out and ate them in the hotel lobby. I was satisfied.
After eating, I walked a little more. The Chamber of Commerce, the hotel, and the warehouses are mostly from the Meiji to early Showa eras, and now they are either used for other purposes or stand unused. As I walked, the whole city felt like a museum, which was interesting but also inevitably tinged with melancholy.
I returned to the inn at 9:00 AM, got ready, and left at 9:40 AM. I headed north along the coastal road toward Shukutsu.
At 9:55 AM, I arrived at the Herring Mansion.
This is a house that Tanaka Fukumatsu, a herring fishing boss in Tomari Village in West Shakotan, spent seven years building starting in 1891. It was moved to this location in 1958. It is said that enough timber was used to build twenty 30-tsubo houses. The pillars and beams were assembled with dimensions you don't see anymore.
During the peak season from February to May, about 120 fishermen lived and slept here. The side where the owner's family lived and the side where the fishermen slept are clearly separated. Inside the building, fishing tools and items from the life in the bunkhouse were lined up. A few students on a school trip walked past, looking bored.
Herring would swarm in during the spawning season, turning the sea white and murky. This is called 'Kuki'. In the 1950s, that Kuki suddenly stopped coming. There are various theories about the cause, but in short, they just stopped coming.
This building, then, is a house built for something that no longer comes.
The Hiyoriyama Lighthouse stands at the tip of Cape Takashima. It was first lit in 1883 and was used in the filming of Keisuke Kinoshita's 'The Eternal Moment'. I can see Todo Rock (Sea Lion Rock) offshore. It is said that wild sea lions live there, but they were not to be seen that day.
After 11:00 AM, I stopped by the former Aoyama Villa.
The Aoyama family moved to Hokkaido from Yamagata in 1859, and two generations of father and son, Tomekichi and Masakichi, made a massive fortune in herring fishing. The third generation, Masae, spent over six and a half years building this villa starting in 1917. She had large quantities of zelkova wood transported from Sakata. The alcove was made with rosewood and ebony, the ceiling was covered with wide boards of Jindai cedar, and it is said that painters following the Kano school competed to paint the sliding doors. There are gardens on three sides, and photography was prohibited inside.
It seems that every time herring was pulled from the sea, that money transformed into zelkova, Jindai cedar, and rosewood, piling up into this house.
As for what happened to the third-generation Masae, there is no record. All that remains is the house.
For lunch, we went into Aozuka Shokudo in Shukutsu. I ordered the sashimi set meal, and my wife ordered the grilled hachikaku set meal. Hachikaku, or 'eight-corner,' is a name derived from its octagonal cross-section; it looks a bit grotesque, but it is a high-quality fish that is not often found. We were served fried atka mackerel paste as a complimentary side. The restaurant filled up in an instant, and a line formed outside.
After finishing lunch, we headed toward Yoichi.
At 1:00 PM, we passed through the main gate of the Nikka Whisky Yoichi Distillery. It was the same gate we had viewed from the outside just the day before, seeing only the roof because we were 15 minutes too late.
In the kiln tower, peat is on display. This is the source of that smoky aroma. We proceeded through the crushing and saccharification building and the fermentation building, and upon entering the distillation building, we saw rows of pot stills. Among them, one was noticeably smaller than the rest. It has been in use since the company was founded.
Yoichi is the only place in Japan that fires its pot stills with direct coal heat. They say they add coal every 10 minutes. This means that the coal that Otaru no longer transports is still being burned here.
The sign on the office building from the time of the company's founding reads 'Dai Nippon Kaju Co., Ltd.' (Great Japan Fruit Juice Company). 'Nikka' is an abbreviation of 'Nikka' (Nippon Kaju). Masataka Taketsuru chose this location because it had the right climate, water, barley, and coal, but whisky takes many years from the time it is distilled until it is ready for sale. During those years, the company survived by selling apple juice. The company name is a remnant of that time.
On the premises, the Rita House, named after his wife Rita, and the former Taketsuru residence still stand. Only the entrance of the Taketsuru residence is open to the public, allowing a glimpse of the Japanese-Western eclectic interior. Many storage warehouses stand in a row, and inside Warehouse No. 1, barrels are stacked in silence.
When the tour ended, it was time for the tasting.
I had to drive the car back to Chitose. Therefore, I could not drink the whisky. I gratefully accepted the apple juice that was served instead.
We left Yoichi at 2:00 PM. After driving for a while, the weather turned ominous, and rain began to fall in drops. We had managed to avoid the rain for two days, but it started to pour just as we were on our way home, as if it had finally caught up with us.
We returned the car at New Chitose and had shrimp soba for an early dinner. We arrived at Haneda at 7:00 PM. Shortly before landing, there were black clouds to the north of the Kanto Plain, and lightning occasionally flashed within them. I learned later that large hail had fallen in Gunma.
My pedometer showed 17,925 steps for the previous day and 17,396 steps for this day. The herring have left, the railway that carried the coal has vanished, and I walked for two days through a city where tourist boats now float on a canal that no longer sees barges. In that city, at 7:30 in the morning, the siren still sounds.
In the warehouses of Yoichi, barrels are still sleeping. Compared to the years passing by inside those barrels, the few years I have to wait until I can drink it are nothing to count.
(June 1–2, 2022)