OFF THE BEATEN TRACK IN THE SOUTH: KYUSHU
Kyushu is the furthest South of the 4 main islands of Japan and is connected to the mainland via the Shinkansen train line. The only way to go even further would be to fly to the Okinawa island chain that stretches nearly to Taiwan. Not only does Kyushu have some stunning active volcanoes and natural scenery, as well as the warmest weather in the country (again, excluding the Okinawas), the island has also had a disproportionately large impact on Japanese history compared to its population. Locals told us that, due to their distance from the centre, they have always had to work harder and be very active in politics to ensure they weren’t forgotten about!
We made a round in Kyushu starting from Nagasaki in the West, followed by moving East to Kumamoto and Aso, then continuing down to the South to Kagoshima, and finally to the Southest point to Ibusuki.
Nagasaki – Gunkanjima Island and the Atomic Bomb Museum
Nagasaki today is mainly known as the site of the second atomic bomb that was used against Japan in World War II. Besides this tragic past, however, Nagasaki has had a very rich history during Japan’s centuries of isolation: this was the only port were contact and trade with foreigners was allowed. The city was also in the forefront of Japan’s industrial modernisation following the end of feudalism due to having here a major coal mine and the centre of the Mitsubishi Heavy Industries (which, besides being a famous car brand, is also a key player in other heavy industries, such as shipbuilding).
Unfortunately, most of the historic neighbourhood on the island of Dejima where foreigners (primarily Dutch) were allowed to live and trade has been built over, but we were still able to see the legacy of the past with a visit to the abandoned city and coalmines of Gunkanjima Island, as well as the Nagasaki Atomic Bomb museum.
If the pictures of Gunkanjima, the ghost island seem familiar, it is probably because it was a scene in the James Bond movie, Skyfall. Before achieving cinematic fame as a city of abandoned high-rise apartment buildings, it was one of several deep sea coalmines in Nagasaki harbour. Coal was found in the area in the 1850’s and the tiny islands there were perfect places to build little mining cities on them to extract the fuel of Japan’s rapid industrialisation. Despite living right above the coal deposits, workers still had to commute an hour each way – down the mineshafts, over 1km deep! Everything was very crowded since space on the islands was at a premium while many workers were needed to run the mine, therefore these islands became the first scenes of innovative use of living space. Japan’s first steel-reinforced high-rise apartment building was built in Gunkanjima, and staircases lead to the air to the top of buildings to make use of every square meter. The tiny island housed over 4000 people, leading to a population density 10 times that of Tokyo today! I pity the poor children who had to go to kindergarten on the top of a 10-story building each day – the only place they could find space for a school room! The whole island was a company town, run by Mitsubishi Heavy Industries to supply coal for their operations on the mainland (including the Mitsubishi dockyard, still one of the largest in the world). On the plus side workers were very well compensated, with an entry-level miner earning twice the salary of the government official in Nagasaki, and every household had a black-and-white television already in the 1950’s! As Japan started replacing coal with oil and nuclear power, the production gradually became uneconomical and the mines were finally closed in the 1980’s. Interestingly enough, the proposal for abandoning the city came from the workers` union, since it was obvious that the highly-skilled workers would easily be given other jobs within Mitsubishi on the mainland instead. The coal-mining facilities were dismantled, but the apartments were left here empty, like a ghost town. The island looks like a battleship from the distance with tall concrete buildings, which is what Gunkanjima means. Along with the other monuments of Nagasaki’s industrial past and present (such as the cranes in the Mitsubishi dockyard) the island is a UNESCO World Heritage site. Part of the island was opened to the public in 2009 for sightseeing tours by boat but you are strictly prohibited from wandering off the marked paths, as many buildings are unstable. We almost didn’t make it to the island, as our booked tour was cancelled due to abysmal weather in Nagasaki and the seas were too rough to dock at the island. Luckily we were able to flex our schedule, and despite being fully booked on their website for the next day, the company was also able to squeeze in some additional passengers!
The other key sight in Nagasaki is the Atomic Bomb Museum that aims to tell the story of the suffering caused by the second atomic bomb used in history (3 days after Hiroshima) in the hope that it will also be the last one. While Japan was clearly losing the war by the summer of 1945 (indeed, Germany had already surrendered on 9 May 1945), wartime fanaticism and a deep Japanese culture aversion to admitting failure led to fears that the war would drag on for years if the main Japanese islands would have to be conquered one by one, leading to a great loss of life on both sides. In order to shorten the war, the USA decided to use these newly developed weapons against two secondary Japanese cities, Hiroshima and Nagasaki on 6 and 9 August 1945. (It seems reasonable to assume though, that secondary motivations were to demonstrate its power to the Soviets ahead of the unfolding Cold War, as well as to justify to the American public the enormous investment the Manhattan Project had required to develop the bomb). Realising they were helpless against the destructive power of the atomic bomb, Japan surrendered unconditionally, what followed was a 7-year American occupation, while they started helping rebuild the country, both economically and in terms of democratic institutions. As a consequence, today Japan is a pacifist nation, meaning that they don’t have an army, and their constitution bars the use of military force abroad, and is still one of the foremost American allies in the region.
Even in the historical context, the suffering caused by the bomb was terrible. Pretty much everything within 4km of the bomb site was destroyed to the ground, either by the bomb itself, or by the fires that followed and burned unchecked because all the infrastructure was crippled (most firefighting stations were destroyed too, along with the water supply). Almost half of the city’s population died either then, or in the months afterwards from radiation poisoning, with some cancers taking years to manifest themselves. It is perhaps a small blessing that no negative radiation effects have been observed in the generations born afterwards (even if their parents were effected). It was shocking to see pictures of metal bridges ripped out of their foundations and hurled dozens of meters, touch the actual roof tiles and stones that had melted, and see wooden doors which were completely scorched – except for the shape of a human body, where a person who happened to be standing in front of it shielded the door from the worst heat. While it is gruesome to look at, the museum’s purpose is to ensure that the scale of the suffering by such a weapon is never forgotten.
The city and the museum also play a big international role in supporting global nuclear disarmament in the belief that any country possessing such weapons is at the risk of a potential accident. The exhibit that was most surprising to me was the section which highlighted the impact of ongoing nuclear testing today, where nuclear weapons explode in supposedly uninhabited areas such as the American desert or in the middle of Siberia to test new weapon designs. Despite strong international and environmental opposition, 2-3 explosions still happen per year globally, and the claimed “uninhabited” regions often turn out to be populated areas! Recorded video testimonials bear witness to hardships these people endure and the environmental degradation that continues to occur – all in places which we are led to believe are uninhabited.
Shimabara – Samurai Houses and Famous Springwater
While the delay to the Gunkanjima boat tour meant that we had to scrap our trek to the Unzen volcano, we still stopped by Shimabara, a small village with a huge castle and a row of old samurai houses. While these samurai had a nice spot to live in near the castle, it turned out that they weren’t very rich and their jobs were a lot less sexy than we imagined: following the 15th century, as internal conflicts in Japan gradually died down and wars became less frequent, their role increasingly became that of a clerk to their lord (e.g. managing the timber harvest in an area). When a lord was moved to a different domain on the other side of the country, he took along all the samurai who had served his family through the generations, and had to find them a new role there. A domain’s (and thereby the lord’s) wealth was measured by the amount of rice it could produce – a smaller domain like the Shimabara peninsula could produce 50,000 koku of rice, while the province of Kumamoto was a massive 950,000 koku! The lord passed on part of this income to his samurai and sub-lords, by way of comparison a samurai household received around 5-10 koku per year.
Shimabara is supposedly famous throughout Japan for its amazingly clear spring water. The municipality runs a teahouse overlooking a fascinating Japanese garden where a lady in kimono gives out free green tea to demonstrate the difference using the local water makes. Tea in Japan comes in a myriad of different varieties, all of them green – but it can be hot or cold (even from vending machines), clear or frothy, from powder or leaves, cheap or horrendously expensive. There is green tea flavoured ice cream, cakes and even Kit Kats. Unfortunately, there is no option for having sugar or lemon with your tea, and hence, I have yet to taste a single tea which I find drinkable, so I’ve stopped trying, but Renata finds that she can get used to the taste as she drinks it without sugar or lemon anyways.
The lady serving tea sat down with us to chat, but after saying a few times that the tea was good and the garden was pretty, we soon ran out of conversation topics as our knowledge of Japanese doesn’t go much further than “Konichiwa” (Good day), “Sayonara” (Good bye) and “Arigato” (Thank you) and her English wasn’t much better either. We were therefore relieved when another set of visitors arrived, a couple who have been travelling almost non-stop for 8 years!
Kumamoto
After Shimabara, our next stop was the city of Kumamoto, which is normally famous for two things: its castle (which played a role in the samurai rebellion captured in the Last Samurai – any Tom Cruise fans here?) and its emblem, Kumamon, a cute bear with red cheeks that became a hit throughout all of Japan! Unfortunately, in the past week, the region has also been in the news as the location of two back-to-back earthquakes which caused the death of over a dozen people. Luckily, we had left the city nearly a week before then, but it was shocking to see in the news pictures of the collapsed castle ramparts where we had walked just recently. Our condolences to the people who had lost loved ones or who now need to rebuild their lives.
At this point, I feel that a brief summary about the end of feudalism in Japan and its rapid modernisation is needed to put the historical role of the region into perspective (both Kumamoto, and the following city we visited, Kagoshima). During the Edo period (1603-1868), Japan was effectively ruled by the Tokugawa shogun (whom we wrote about in Nikko), while the emperor was a figurehead who only retained nominal power (we’re told the Japanese imperial family is the longest-reigning royal dynasty in the world). Compared to the previous centuries, relative stability was achieved, however this was made possible by Japan’s complete isolation from the outside world, and contact with foreigners was only allowed in the district of Dejima in Nagasaki (actually, more like 2 streets rather than a district). This isolation not only kept out dangerous Western ideas (such as Christianity, which caused a number of rebellions before it was outlawed), but also caused Japan to become outclassed both technologically and economically by the West. After Western powers forced the end of this isolation in 1853, all these ignored tensions resurfaced and the country was forced to confront reality. Motivated primarily by a fear of being colonised by the West, some lords co-led by Satsuma (which is Kagoshima today) saw the need to create a strong centralised government who could modernise the country. They found an ally in the emperor Meiji and began a movement to overthrow the shogunate and restore actual power to him so he could carry out his ambitious plans for the renewal of Japan. After some small skirmishes, the Tokugawa shogun resigned and handed over his authority to the emperor (the Meiji Restoration). Events then proceeded at a very rapid pace and included the confiscation of the feudal domains (they were asked to donate them to the country), the reformation of the education system and eventually the replacement of the samurai by a Western-style standing army and the abolishment of the samurai caste. While a large portion of the elite were offered positions in the new order (e.g. feudal lords became governors of the newly created prefectures, and some samurai became officers in the new army), it was impossible to do so for everyone. Additionally, some were concerned about the impact of losing their Japanese way of life (e.g. men trimmed their beards and started to wear suits) and adopting the traditions of Western people who only a dozen years ago were considered barbarians.
A revolt started against the new order in 1877, led in a remarkable turn of events by the same person who had helped the emperor achieve his throne, the lord of Satsuma (his proposal for invading Korea to give the newly unemployed samurai an honourable cause to die for was rejected, hence he resigned his position in government and rebelled). This is where Kumamoto comes into the picture, which was the largest fortification on the island of Kyushu (which, since it is black, it can easily be differentiated from all the other Japanese castles, most of which are white). As the revolt spread North, towards the centre, a small garrison of Imperial troops made a valiant last stand against the rebellion. During the siege, the castle caught fire and burned to the ground (hence the current castle is a reconstruction), but the defenders held out for long enough that Imperial reinforcements arrived and defeated the rebels. This chain of events is depicted with a somewhat tenuous grip on history in the movie the Last Samurai. As a matter of fact, the rebellious samurai didn’t reject modern weaponry, and there is no record of Tom Cruise’s character in history, and no mention of Kumamoto castle in the movie. In all fairness, the directors said the movie aims to be more an introduction to Japanese culture and values, which it does quite well. If you liked the beautiful scenery in the movie, you should definitely go and visit New Zealand, as that is where it was all filmed!
The other star of Kumamoto is the cartoon character Kumamon, a fatty black bear with red cheeks, who was born to popularise tourism in Kumamoto. We grew attached to him after a few days, his picture is everywhere in the province, from the guide to onsen etiquette (strictly no swimwear allowed, or else Kumamon starts blushing – seriously, you’d think it was the other way around!), the warnings at the train station (Kumamon was running to catch his train when he slipped and fell), not to mention all the local foodstuff (which is a smart move, of course we had to try Kumamon’s favourite desert!). We even took a picture of him by later on in Aso, a volcano we climbed.
Finally, have you ever been to a buffet, where everything was in Japanese and you had no idea what any of the foods were until you tried them (and sometimes not even then!)? It was worth taking the risk in Kumamoto, and trying out a place where there seemed to be plenty of locals, because we were able to try bites of different kinds of food that we wouldn’t have wanted to order a full portion of! The black sesame cake deserved a special mention here.
Aso
After a busy day in Kumamoto we took a small countryside train crossing vegetable fields and picturesque landscapes to hike the famous volcano in Aso, where you can walk around the crater and see the bubbling water inside! Today there are several volcanos in the area, but long time ago the whole basin was one mega-volcano with a circumference of over 100km. You can still see the ridge all around the horizon, and the pretty villages that today host hikers were built inside the caldera.
Unfortunately, we had found out just the day before our trip from fellow tourists that the 1km vicinity of the volcano has been off-limits for some months now due to a level 2 eruption warning, therefore we couldn`t hike the currently active volcano but the neighbouring mountains instead. The locals told us that it was nothing to worry about the warning though, the volcano is only closed off so that hikers caught outdoors don’t end up breathing in the thick ash should there be an eruption. The annoyance of the locals is that when there is an eruption, the wind tends to blow the ash towards the village, which covers everything in several centimetres of dust.
On our hike we still had some very pretty views with the smoking mountain and some lagoons around, and we almost managed to see the inside of the caldera too from a vantage point. The wind was bitterly cold though so we were very glad for the knitted hat and gloves that we invested in way back in Bolivia!
The hostel where we were staying organised an international exchange event for the evening of our arrival, where foreigners and Japanese would teach each other about the language and culture over a barbeque. Apart from some essentials, we picked up some further useful phrases: I was more interested in learning how to ask in a supermarket where the cocoa and granola were, while Renata tried to get a translation for the phrase “I don’t like seafood”. It took a couple of tries to explain what she meant (“No, she isn’t vegetarian; no, she isn’t allergic to shellfish; and yes, she does eat fish”) and it turns out that the phrase doesn’t exist in Japanese, you have to list each type of seafood (squid, mussels, scallop, prawn, octopus, oysters to name a few) you don’t like! At this point I also started taking notes, as I wanted to be able to ask for these from the menu – yummy! Another key learning of the evening were the characters for milk, which would be written as “gjú nyú” in Hungarian phonetics. This was a particularly important learning, since we had started eating muesli and milk in Japan to avoid miso soup and rice for breakfast. However, several other milk-based products look deceptively similar, both in terms of texture and the drawings on the milk cartons, and we had twice bought a type of sweetish drinking yoghurt only to realise our errors after we had poured it on our cereal or in Renata’s coffee. By itself the yoghurt was actually quite OK – but it is better when not mixed with something else!
During the BBQ there were 2 large hot metal plates on the table in front of everyone with all the raw ingredients piled on the table, and everyone put whatever he preferred to eat on the grill. It was a lot more fun than how we do it back at home, where one person is responsible for grilling all the food, and usually can’t participate in the conversation. Thanks to the locals sitting around the table, there were a lot of unusual items being grilled and eaten, some of which we will probably replicate at home (asparagus), some which we might not (small fish, including their heads, intestines and spines, fermented beans filled in tofu bread).
Kagoshima and Ibusuki
Kagoshima prefecture was the furthest South we travelled, which used to be called Satsuma, this is where satsuma fruit (similar to mandarins) come from. There is an island in Kagoshima harbour with yet another huge volcano that erupts on average three times a day. Due to the unique soil, the volcano is famous for its tiny satsuma (the whole fruit is the size of a cherry) and its huge radishes (bigger than a pumpkin). Renata fell in love with the tiny satsuma, but it turns out they look cuter than they are tasy or practical – by the time you peeled them, you’re up to your elbows in juice, but there is nothing left of the fruit! We did a bit of walking in the beautiful sunshine on the volcano’s shore and tried to do some dolphin-spotting (alas, we were unsuccessful), but we felt lazy and took the bus up to the volcano lookout to see the smoke. The island is a popular escape to the green for locals from Kagoshima, and hence it has a nice chilled out atmosphere. We tried here a local favourite, where you get a seasoned boiling soup on a fire at your table, then in separate bowls you get some vegetables and bacon that you need to boil in the soup for yourself. Once the ingredients are boiled, you fish them out to dig into soya sauce and eat them, accompanied with some boiled rice and pickles.
A dinner worth mentioning is the amazing black pork stew I had amongst the food stalls next to Kagoshima-Chuo station for dinner here. The stalls aim to promote the wide variety of locally grown food and local cuisine (black pork and black chicken are local favourites) and are well-worth a try; it never ceases to surprise us how much local food can differ from one region of Japan to another!
The following day we jumped on a local train to go to Ibusuki, a little village an hour train ride away from Kagoshima city and with enough attractions for a day-trip, or even for spending a bit more time. We did a 2-hour hike up to the lookout point on Kaimon-dake mountain after a busride with nice views over the vegetable fields around the mountain.
After the hike we stopped by a culinary pilgrimage site for a late lunch. A restaurant here invented “flowing noodles”, where normal (as far as we could tell) noodles are put in a doughnut-shaped glass ring in the middle of your table, with flowing cold water (exactly 13 degrees to be precise). This is particularly practical for lazy people, because the noodles start circling around your table too, and you can just dip your chopsticks in the water and wait for the noodles to get caught up in them! When you fish out the noodle you dig them into soya sauce before eating each bite. We got some pickles and meat to accompany this, and we also tried the local miso soup, which has boiled fish in it. To our surprise the slice of fish contained the skin and even the scales, so it took a while to fish these all out too! While it was a funny idea to try it once, we thought the food itself was nothing you can’t miss – apparently 70,000 Japanese each year disagree, and visit this one restaurant! The place doesn’t get really packed until May onwards when the weather gets better, since it`s best to eat cold pasta in the summer, so it was a very strange feeling sitting in a huge restaurant with tables numbered up until the 800’s with only 10 or so people eating!
After we had sated our appetite from the hiking, it was time to relax our bodies as well from the walking and volcano climbing of the past days. Ibusuki has a couple of unique steam sand bath onsens, where you get buried in the sand on the beach with only your head sticking out, and the steam rising from the ground heats the sands to a quite warm temperature. You have to be careful not to wiggle around too much though, moving your fingers even a centimetre deeper can raise the temperature to scalding hot! After 15-20 minutes of relaxing and sweating you dig yourself out, which we figured out ourselves, as no one came to dig us out when the recommended time was over. After the treatment you go back to the normal onsen to bath and use the sauna inside the main building.
This brought us to the end of our adventure-filled week-long trip to Kyushu, which left a big impact on us in terms of its natural beauty and rich history! While a lot of people don’t make it this far South from Tokyo and Kyoto, we would recommend not missing this unique region of Japan, which presents a very different experience from the people-packed usual tourist trail. Next up is the journey back to the Kansai region, with the cities of Osaka, Kyoto and Nara as highlights, as well as a pilgrimage road and spending a night in a Buddhist monastery!