Aomori is one of the northern most cities on the main island of Japan – Honshu. And further north there is the second biggest island – Hokkaido. Hokkaido is one of the most popular places in Japan, especially in winter, when the snow covers the entire island and in some places reaches even a couple metres in height. The biggest city in Hokkaido is Sapporo, and were it connected with a bullet train, I would probably have visited it as well. Unfortunately though, the HSR line to Sapporo is still under construction and won’t be complete until at least 2027. Thus I basically only stayed in Aomori and there was still a lot to see and do for the duration of 3 days that we spent there.
Aomori is a city probably most known for the Nebuta Matsuri festival and Hokkaido apples. As a matter of fact, most apples in Japan come from Hokkaido. That is why you will find apple products on every corner of Aomori – shops, vending machines, convenience shops, everywhere! And you might also notice that apple juices around Japan mention the name Aomori pretty often. This city is also a great place to hike and has a rich history spanning all the way to 5500BC. Exploring the city’s history was also our first destination.
We visited the Maruyama Sannai, which is one of Unesco’s World Heritage sites. It is a large archeological site contain the ruins of a very large Jomon period settlement. The site was discivered in 1992 during a survey of the area planned for a baseball stadium. The site has many storage pits, Jomon era artefacts and a couple replicas of that period’s buildings. Maruyama Sannai is just one of the many archeological sites in northern Japan. I visited a similar place in Izumo last year. However, that archeological museum featured artefacts from a later time in history – the Yayoi period (300 BCE to 300 CE), which follows the Jomon period (14000 BCE to 300 BCE). The Sannai site features many dirt houses as well as wooden and straw houses that were all used for different purposes such as living, storage, praying etc. While some of the houses were built above a pit, the others were built on pillars above the ground. The mix of different buildings makes the settlement really interesting to explore. But the settlement also has a very strange building in the middle of it. It is a huge 3 storey scaffolding like building (again a replica). I was really wondering what it was all about, but even after reading about it I still had no clue. Not much was written about it besides how it was built. At first I joked that perhaps this is how the red bull competitions began (the ones where they push those home made planes from high platforms), but in all seriousness, my guess is this building was used as a part of ceremony or something similar. Or maybe they simply used it to get a better view of the surroundings? Who knows. The one thing we did know is that we were really hungry. And this lead us to the only restaurant this place had. Perhaps not the best choice – I prefer to venture into the local restaurants – but the food proved to be pretty good anyways. I ordered a Japanese chicken curry with a side serving of rice and a small salad. It wasn’t the best curry I have ever had, but being hungry made the food twice as tasty!
However, even after lunch, I was still hungry and thinking about food. Where could I get some food? After a short stroll we found a perfect place for that. At the Aomori coast there was some kind of a festival going on. Perhaps this was a celebration of the Respect for the Aged Day? Because incidentally, it was that day, 16th of September. This is also why entry to the Sannai archeological park was free and why there were a lot of people everywhere we went. Or was it the Hokkaido festival the was also being celebrated on that day? The verdict is that I am not really sure. What matters is that there were a bunch of food stalls – sweets, yakitori, potatoes, etc. There were at least 1000 people and a big stage with Japanese performers playing various J-pop songs (unfamiliar to me). I found the music quite pleasing in combination with the food, but once I finished the potato (tornado) skewer, we were on our way to the next destination – the nearby shrine and later Nebuta Museum.
The shrine was nothing new to me. I have seen many such shrines before – red colour, the main praying hall and a couple of tori gates. There was also a monk taking care of the shrine and making sure visitors like us behaved properly. So we didn’t bother to stay there for too long and moved on to the museum. The museum contained the history of Nebuta Matsuri festival. Nebuta is the type of float used during this festival. The float usually depicts a warrior and is carried by many people wearing special festival clothing called haneto. Oh and by the way, matsuri means festival. The three large floats that were present in the museum were also used in the previous festivals and looking at them I can only start to imagine the hours of effort that go into creating such a masterpiece. One really nice thing about this museum is that there was also a short demonstration of the festival. A bunch of people dressed just like during the festival and performed chants, danes and played drums just like during the festival. It was really loud but it really did feel a bit like we were in the middle of a true festival.
And in the evening it was time for another dessert – this time we stopped in the A-Factory. A-Factory is most likely short for Apple Factory. And as explained before, this shops sells apples, apple pastry, apple parfume – and everything else made of apples. This city really seems to love their apples. And just like the people of Aomori, I couldn’t help myself but buy an apple pie to enjoy later. And by the time we exited the shop, the sun was already setting. This is when I managed to get some amazing photos before we returned back to the hotel to go to sleep.
The following 2 days however, we didn’t really do anything special. While at first I might have planned a hike or two, I later realised I perhaps just wanted to explore the city a bit more. And this is what we did. We found a different lunch place every day, visited a museum of Aomori’s naval transport, tried natto for the first time, found a really nice spot to relax next to a lighthouse, found a nice izakaya where I could get some skweres and passed a group of older people who seemed to be really amused to see us. First of all, they didn’t even hide the fact that they were watching us and secondly they seemed to have a lot of fun forming random English sentences such as “I am a cat”, “I am sorry”. With each sentence they let out a loud laugh, just confirming my suspicion about them making fun of us. Let them have fun I say. Oh and another thing, we tried the Sukiya chain restaurant. Sukiya is like the Japanese McDonalds, but instead of serving unhealthy food, they serve normal food like salads, rice bowls and similar – no fries, burgers and McNuggets. I was really impressed with the lunch, ordering a set meal and two or three extra things and it cost me less than 10 EUR all together. It wasn’t the best restaurant I have ever been to, but it was certainly very cheap. I would recommend it and will visit it again.
The post about Aomori might be a little bit short given we have spent 3 days here. But this is mainly due to the fact that we mainly explored the city and took things easy. I had a lot of fun just exploring this city and nothing going for day trips and hikes like usually.
