Tuesday, 28 October 2025

Today was a travel day, moving from Otaru to the south of Hokkaido in Hakodate, but before that I had one more museum to tick off, the former Mitsui Bank Otaru Branch. They claimed the typical visit would take 30 minutes and I had about 45 between opening and having to walk to the train station. I didn’t have high expectations but I had the time so why not?

the front of the former bank

An impressive looking place and I was first customer of the day. You can visit three levels, the vault in the basement, the first floor where the board room was located and the main level where the tellers used to live, and that’s the order I tackled it.

serious looking safe

That door is huge and probably heavy.

door to the safe

Plenty of deposit boxes.

deposit boxes

When I came upstairs I just had to take a photo of the modern coin lockers.

coin lockers

View of the main floor from the balcony.

nice sized bank you have there

The board room. Must have been a large, unworkable, board 🙂

the board room

I guess if you were important enough you got the personal touch. Firstly a meeting room and then the safe room that connects to it.

customer meeting room

customer meeting room

a cage with a safe

And finally what it used to be like when it was operating in 1927.

historic photo

That done it was off up the hill to the train station, hoping all the way that the light rain didn’t turn into something worse and leave me wet for the day.

I made it OK and once inside I noticed the wall of lamps above the departure board. No idea what was going on but my hotel also had a thing for these sort of lamps. The second image is from the platform side.

a wall of lamps

up close

The same 2 unit train as yesterday to Kutchan, a bit more people on it possibly because it connects to the train to Oshamambe. I wasn’t sure how to handle ticketing for this train as the board in Otaru didn’t include a price but I had plenty of time in Kutchan so I did the obvious and bought a ticket to Kutchan in Otaru and a ticket from there to Oshamambe in Kutchan. I had bought the Limited Express ticket on the JR East’s web site so I could collect it in Kutchan (or any of the stations but Kutchan was convenient). In the corridor between the platforms and the station they had some posters about the progress of the extension of the Hokkaido Shinkansen and I learned that 80% of it will be in tunnels so if you want to see the scenery the slow train will be better. Also apparently they have had trouble hitting unexpected rock around Mt Yotei and it broke their tunnel boring machine. I think it delayed progress for over two years while they built another tunnel to blast away the rock.

poster on shinkansen progress

This second train of the day was a single unit but everyone still got a seat though. Nice scenery though the mountains, some snow around the ski resorts at Niseko.

My plan had been to buy lunch or at least snacks at Oshamambe but that failed miserably. The station had seen better days, possibly no work done on it due to the Shinkansen coming through (eventually) but this image sums it up.

nearest shops aren’t close enough

I didn’t have that long so I’d just have to wait for dinner. Speaking of dinner, a Genghis Khan set made with Australian lamb, at a tiny restaurant nearish to my hotel, the feels like temperature is -1C and it feels colder due to the wind.

tiny restaurant

fantastic food

A bit of exploring is on the agenda tomorrow, forecast claims to be fine with a max of 10C.