Hagi City is located in the northern region of Yamaguchi Prefecture, which is the most western point of Japan’s main island of Honshu, with an estimated population of 53,000.
The Sea of Japan lies to the north of the city. The downtown area of the city is situated on the delta of the Abu river and faces the Sea of Japan. This area, known as the Hagi Delta, is home to many beautiful sights and spots of historical interest.
Hagi is far from urban areas, but is famous as “the city of sightseeing” with about 2.3 million annual tourists. Today a visit to Hagi is like a trip back in time where visitors can get a sense of living in feudal Japan before the dawn of the modern period.
Hagi castle town was built in 1604 by Lord Terumoto Mori. For about 260 years, Hagi flourished as the castle town, and was the political, economic, cultural and military center of the Choshu domain which played a key role in overthrowing the Tokugawa Shogunate, and bringing about the modernization and unification of Japan.
The map of the castle town drawn in the Edo period can be still used as a city map even today. That is because the castle town built in the same period has been well preserved. So many valuable cultural assets representative of Japan still remain in the city, such as castle ruins, samurai residences, townhouses, temples, and so on.
‘Open Air Museum of Hagi’ Strategy
Hagi city government has recently been actively promoting ‘the Open Air Museum of Hagi’. This project has been launched under the name of ‘Machiju Hakubutsukan’ to further preserve valuable cultural assets and hand them over to future generations.
Hagi has made pioneering efforts prior to nationally enacted law in the area of heritage. The ‘Hagi City Ordinance for the Protection of Cultural Properties’ (a municipal bylaw) was enacted in 1972. After various endeavours of city governments such as Hagi, the Japanese Government amended the ‘Act on Protection of Cultural Properties’ in 1975 and introduced a designation system for ‘Important Preservation Districts for Groups of Historic Buildings’ in Japan. Currently, Hagi has the same number of areas designated as ‘Important Preservation Districts for Groups of Historic Buildings’ as in Kyoto. This is the highest number of such preserved districts in Japan.
Bid for World Heritage status
‘The Modern Industrial Sites in Kyushu and Yamaguchi’ was included in Japan’s tentative list for nomination to the World Heritage List in 2009. There are five sites in Hagi currently nominated for inscription in the World Heritage list in 2015.
For more information on Hagi please see the JNTO tourism page here, and here to download a tourist pamphlet
