Goryōkaku: The Government Inside the Star

Two teapot lids recovered from a refuse deposit at Goryōkaku carry dates from 1864 and 1865. Their inscriptions also name a section of the magistrate's office. Hakodate's archaeological catalogue places them among the cups, pots, inkstones, and other objects left by the government establishment within the fort.^[1]

The dates belong to the office's first years, before the battle for which Goryōkaku became famous. Inside its five-pointed perimeter, officials had matters to record and business to conduct. The fort was built around that work. Its center contained a regional headquarters, rather than a regional lord's castle keep.^[2]

What, then, was the star intended to protect? And what happened to that purpose when the government occupying its center changed? Following the office as well as the earthworks reveals a less direct path to the battlefield. Goryōkaku served the Tokugawa shogunate, passed to the new Meiji government, and was subsequently occupied by forces fighting against it. Its defenses endured through changes in the authority they enclosed.

The Treaty of Kanagawa in 1854 required the opening of Hakodate to American vessels. The shogunate, Japan's military government under the Tokugawa family, re-established a magistrate's office there that year. The institution's responsibilities combined dealings with foreign representatives, coastal defense, and administration of the northern territories under its jurisdiction. Foreign relations were becoming part of a regional government's ordinary work.^[3]

The office initially occupied a site at the foot of Mount Hakodate, above the harbor. A commanding view worked in both directions: officials could look out over the port, but ships in the port could see the office. The authorities also worried about observation from the mountain, which lay within the area open to foreign movement. Moving the headquarters inland would separate administrative business from some of the exposure of its waterfront position.^[4]

The chosen site lay at Kameda, close enough to maintain connections with the town while gaining distance from the harbor. Water could be brought from the Kameda River. The terrain and approaches also entered the assessment. The project was first described in the language of its function: the earthworks of the Kameda government office.^[4]

Distance was only one part of the defensive arrangement. The shogunate also developed coastal batteries, including Benten at the harbor. Those works addressed vessels near the waterfront; the inland enclosure protected the headquarters. The two locations should not be compressed into a single fortress imagined to do everything from one set of guns.^[5]

The plan therefore concerned the survival of administration as well as resistance to attack. Officials needed a place to carry on governing and negotiating even while preparing for the possibility of hostilities. A position chosen solely for shooting across the harbor would answer a different question from one chosen to shelter the institution managing that harbor. Goryōkaku's inland location makes sense within this division of responsibilities.

Takeda Ayasaburō, a scholar of Western learning employed by the magistracy, designed the enclosure. His preparation included information obtained from French naval visitors in 1855. Construction began in 1857. European military knowledge was being used by a Tokugawa institution, before the political changes conventionally associated with the Meiji period.^[4][5]

The projecting points are bastions. Their purpose becomes clearer when attention shifts from the star's overall silhouette to the relationship between neighboring faces. A defender looking outward from a straight wall cannot readily cover the ground immediately along every other part of it. A projection creates positions from which defenders can direct fire along an adjoining approach. The relevant geometry is mutual support: one section helps cover another.^[10]

The detached triangular work outside the principal entrance adds a second relationship. Often called the half-moon work at Goryōkaku, it is a ravelin, an outwork screening the approach to the main enclosure. Its separation from the larger star interrupts a direct approach to the entrance. The gate was part of a sequence of obstacles and defended positions, rather than simply a door cut into the perimeter.^[6]

The completed arrangement was not the full initial proposal. Five such outworks had been planned; only one was built after the project was reduced. The surviving asymmetry records a construction decision, not a missing point in the main five-pointed star.^[4] A clean diagram can conceal that distinction between the principal enclosure and its additional defenses.

Local conditions altered the work too. The municipal construction history records frost damage to earthen slopes and subsequent stone-facing work. The builders had to keep banks standing through northern winters as well as arrange them for defense.^[5] Imported geometry did not supply an automatic answer to soil, weather, or the available budget.

Thus the fort's design was worked out on several scales. Bastions related to one another; an outwork related to the entrance; the inland enclosure related to the batteries at the port. Treating the star as a single emblem obscures these separate jobs. Its form becomes more intelligible when each edge is connected with the ground, structure, or approach it was meant to cover.

Building the central office began in 1862. Timber processed around Akita and Noshiro arrived by sea for assembly. Government work began here in 1864; associated construction continued until 1866. The familiar completion date therefore marks the office's opening, not simultaneous completion of every structure.^[7]

This center gave the perimeter its institutional purpose. The surviving plan of the office shows a complex of rooms, passages, and courts rather than one monumental interior. Archaeological investigations later identified building remains and infrastructure that could be compared with the documents.^[8] The task of governing occupied a distributed working environment inside the more immediately recognizable outline of the fort.

The excavated objects bring part of that environment down to the scale of ordinary use. Inkstones and small water containers used in preparing ink belong to written office work. The dated teapot lids connect ceramic equipment to a named office section; the city's interpretation associates the cups and pots with officials' workrooms or rest areas. These objects make a more specific connection than simply finding nineteenth-century pottery somewhere inside a nineteenth-century fort.^[1]

They also change what the defenses appear to protect. Records, staff, meetings, and the routines that kept an office functioning were less conspicuous than ramparts, but without them the government's enclosure would have lacked its daily purpose. The pottery does not reveal the outcome of a negotiation. It establishes a material setting in which administration involved repeated work, writing, and the provisioning of people, rather than only proclamations and exceptional ceremonies.

The relationship with the port remained essential. Building timber arrived by sea, while foreign representatives were among those with whom the magistracy had to deal.^[3][7] Moving inland had not made the office self-sufficient or detached it from maritime connections. The enclosure protected a node in a wider system; it did not replace that system. This dependence would become particularly consequential when war changed who controlled the town and harbor outside it.

Goryōkaku's association with the shogunate's final resistance can hide an intervening transfer. In 1868, the last Hakodate magistrate, Sugiura Makoto, handed the establishment to the new Meiji government's representative. A new regional administration began work in the same compound. Its first name included saibansho, now normally translated as “court,” but here the term designated a broader administrative institution, not a modern court of law.^[9]

The defenses did not have to be rebuilt for the new authority to use the office. A headquarters designed for one government could accommodate another, provided control of the premises and the authority to conduct business passed together. For a time, that was the transition taking place inside the star.

Later in 1868, a different force arrived. Enomoto Takeaki, a former shogunate naval officer, had taken ships north and joined other opponents of the new government. Their advance into southern Ezo—the northern region that included Hokkaidō—brought fighting on the approaches to Hakodate. The new administration withdrew, and Enomoto's forces occupied the vacated Goryōkaku.^[9]

This was not an uninterrupted garrison defending the shogun's office from the moment the old government fell. The same enclosure had first been transferred to the new state and then taken from its retreating regional administration. Its political identity followed occupation and institutional use, not an allegiance fixed permanently in the stonework.

The occupants also altered the fort for their requirements. Municipal curator Nomura Yūichi's account identifies the gun-hauling ramps inside the bastions as additions associated with Enomoto's forces, based on archaeological investigation.^[10] The landscape contains preparation for this later conflict as well as the original construction. A bank surviving within a historic fort is not necessarily evidence of its first design campaign.

Enomoto's forces used Goryōkaku as their principal headquarters during the final phase of the Boshin War, the conflict accompanying the replacement of the shogunate by the Meiji government. But their position depended on more than possession of the fort. Their ships, other defensive positions, and access to the surrounding region formed part of the same struggle.^[11]

The loss of the major warship Kaiyō before the new government's counteroffensive weakened that maritime position. In 1869, government troops landed at Otobe and advanced through southern Hokkaidō. As the campaign developed, Enomoto's forces lost control of the city and their remaining naval position in the harbor. Other strongholds fell or surrendered before Goryōkaku was handed over.^[11]

The inland location did not keep the headquarters beyond all hostile fire. Municipal accounts record naval bombardment reaching the fort from the harbor.^[11] Yet the result cannot be reduced to a contest between a new gun and an old star. Losing the surrounding positions changed the possibilities of reinforcement, movement, and continued resistance, even where a defended perimeter remained physically substantial.

Bastions could organize fire across nearby approaches. They could not regain a harbor or reverse a defeat elsewhere simply by retaining their shape. The defensive system that mattered in 1869 extended beyond the site now enclosed as a historic park. Reading the whole campaign from the moat alone would make the fort appear more independent than it had ever been designed to be.

Goryōkaku surrendered in 1869; the final transfer did not follow a storming of its main enclosure.^[10][11] This conclusion leaves room for both the defenses and their limits. A fortress can remain difficult to assault while the position of the force holding it becomes untenable. The war's end at Goryōkaku was the outcome of a regional land-and-sea campaign, not a demonstration that every surviving rampart had first to be breached.

The Meiji authorities did not resume government business in the office after the war. In 1871, the principal buildings were dismantled. The proposal was to use their timber for the new Sapporo headquarters of the Kaitakushi, the agency administering Hokkaidō. The magistrate-office museum's history records that the timber was not sent there; material was disposed of in other ways, including private sale.^[12]

The distinction between an intended destination and an actual one is useful here. A story in which Hakodate's old office simply became Sapporo's new headquarters would create a material continuity the account does not support. What did occur was the removal of the administrative building from the fort that had protected it.

Military use continued. From 1873, the grounds served as an army drill ground. A municipal request in 1913 obtained permission for a public park on conditions that included retaining the fort's form; public opening followed in 1914. National historic-site protection came in 1922, with Special Historic Site designation in 1952.^[12]

These uses helped keep an enclosure recognizable after its central institution had vanished. They also changed the activity for which people entered it. The old defended ground could accommodate recreation without recreating the magistracy. For a park visitor, the perimeter might consequently become the whole historical object, while the former office survived as an absence at its center.

The observation tower added another way of seeing the site. The first tower opened in 1964 to mark the centenary of the fort's 1864 milestone; its replacement opened in 2006. Its operator describes the elevated view of the star, and even its own modern building adopts five-sided and star-shaped forms.^[13]

The tower makes the perimeter legible as a single figure. That is a modern viewing arrangement, separate from the nineteenth-century defenses themselves. It provides a powerful overview, but an overview cannot on its own explain why a government office once occupied the middle. Recovering that relationship required attention below the scale of the star.

Documentary work and excavation during the 1980s brought the administrative compound into sharper focus. Investigators found building remains, water infrastructure, and boundaries that could be compared with surviving plans. The city's account describes the correspondence between the office remains and documents identifying its layout.^[8]

The two kinds of evidence did different work. Foundations could establish where structural supports had stood. A labeled drawing could identify rooms and show upper-floor arrangements that could not survive as foundations in the soil. Comparing the two allowed investigators to test whether a plan's apparent precision corresponded to the building actually constructed. The museum's reconstruction account describes that comparison as a central part of the project.^[14]

The office plan is therefore more than an illustration to place beside an excavation photograph. It supplies information the excavated ground does not contain, while the ground provides a check on treating a drawing as a complete record of execution. Their agreement supports reconstruction more strongly than either a persuasive-looking plan or scattered foundations considered alone.

The refuse deposits also preserved differences within the site's short sequence of occupation. A deposit overlapping a retainers' barracks site included European glass bottles and mixed domestic wares. The municipal archaeologists considered it more likely to belong to the new government's administration or the wartime occupation than to the original magistracy.^[1] A bottle found at the fort need not have been used by its founding officials.

That sequence restores something the emptied park could not show easily: several governments and groups had inhabited the same protected ground, leaving material that did not all belong to one administrative moment. The excavation did not turn the site into a frozen office of 1864. It provided a more discriminating account of what was built, used, discarded, and subsequently changed.

The magistrate's office opened as a partial reconstruction in 2010. Roughly a third of the former building was rebuilt; the rest of its footprint remained represented at ground level. The chosen extent made a substantial part of the institution understandable in three dimensions without presenting an entire new compound as surviving nineteenth-century fabric.^[2][7]

There was a literal separation between reconstruction and remains. Above the protected archaeology, a concrete foundation slab twenty-five centimeters thick supported the new building. This modern intervention allowed construction on the historic location while retaining the earlier evidence underneath. The project also had to accommodate requirements for a building admitting the public, rather than reproduce every former condition of use.^[14]

The building commonly called the provisions storehouse survives from the fort's working years. Its name, according to the municipal inventory, developed through memories of the war. A former lean-to was restored in 2001–2002 using documentary and archaeological evidence.^[7] Even this survivor combines retained fabric with a later recovery of a missing feature.

The contrast is useful without becoming a competition in authenticity. The storehouse retains historic material. The reconstructed office restores the scale and spatial presence of a lost headquarters. Ground-level markings account for portions not rebuilt. Together, these treatments let a reader distinguish survival, evidence, and interpretation rather than asking every structure to prove the past in the same way.

Returning rooms to the center also changes the question posed by the star. Goryōkaku can be understood again as protection for an operating government, rather than only as the setting of its last battle. The 1868 transfer, subsequent occupation, and 1869 surrender describe different uses of that protected ground. Its defenses were inherited more readily than the authority they had been built to secure.