Hagi City, Yamaguchi Prefecture — A History Portal
The castle town that moved Japan,
and the time it has kept.
From this small castle town of fewer than fifty thousand people came the leaders of the Meiji Restoration, the young men who smuggled themselves abroad to study in the West, and the industrialists who built Japan's heavy industry. Because the railway was routed around the town's center, the streets still follow the very map laid out in the Edo period. Here too was a dense soil of learning — domain schools, private academies, and temple schools packed close together — and a rich table of food raised by the Sea of Japan and the mountains of Abu. This site gathers the "why" of Hagi that the tourist guides leave out.
