Morning Seafood Markets // Hakodate, Japan

“Asaichi” Morning Markets // Hakodate, Japan

The morning markets in hakodate is a pretty amazing place. It was one of my favourite places to go when I was in japan. Although I rarely woke up early enough, on the days that I did, it was my favourite thing to just grab a coffee of hot chocolate from the vending machine and wander around aimlessly watching the people around me and how they live their lives and learn from their culture. It wasn’t often that I would buy seafood, personally I don’t trust myself to prepare it properly to make it taste good, as well as if I did try, I’d probably give myself food poisoning.

While some may think it’s a little barbaric having a fish market selling live produce, I find it interesting that it was the normal everyday way of life. You would always see the grandmas and the grandpas coming down to pick out what to cook for dinner. If I was early enough I would even get the chance to the the boat men coming in from their trawlers and unpacking boxes and boxes of the freshest seafood I’d ever seen.

The photos below are from a trip I took to the morning markets at the end of winter/beginning of spring with a couple of my friends from university. It was cold when we first arrived there and locked our bikes up around the corner, but once we made it inside it was warm and as bustling as I remembered. It had warmed up so much so that my friend Nina and I had a rockmelon soft serve ice cream. Side note, Hakodate (And japan in general) have so many unique soft serve flavours of ice cream everywhere!