Thursday, 8 November 2012
At least three times during the night I lay half asleep trying to figure out what that noise was. It certainly sounded like rain, a possibility I dismissed as absurd first time around, but when it reappeared, with the sound of some sort of emergency vehicle passing by, siren engaged, I considered the possibility a little further.
We're on the thirteenth floor (out of fourteen) and on a corner of a rectangular building, so perhaps rain, driven by a strong wind might account for it. Trouble was, there was no sound of wind.
On the third, or possibly fourth or fifth occasion the penny dropped. It was the air conditioner.
On other days with walking around as a significant part of the agenda, but given the morning's schedule, a rail based loop through southern Kyushu that was going to involve some pretty smart movement given an interval of three minutes between trains at the last changeover, rain wasn't likely to be too much of an issue.
Of course, we needed to get to the station, but with two nights in the same location the Little Red Travelling Bag would be safe and sound in the Sunn Days Inn, Kagoshima.
The loop should bring us back into Kagoshima around a quarter to one, giving us the afternoon and most of the following morning to take a look around the city that has been tagged the Naples of the Eastern world.
A prime bayside location, an impressive stratovolcano (Sakurajima, Kagoshima's equivalent of Vesuvius) and a mild climate that’s largely related to a position as Kyushu's southernmost major city combine to deliver that moniker. It’s the capital of the local prefecture and its largest city by a fair distance.
Right on the southern tip of Kyushu, Kagoshima Prefecture stretches around six hundred kilometres, as far as the boundary with the neighbouring Okinawa Prefecture in the Ryūkyū Islands and includes Yakushima Island, a UNESCO World Natural Heritage Site, the twelve Tokara Islands and Amamioshima, the second largest isolated island in Japan.
Dating back to the fourteenth century. Kagoshima sits on the northeastern Satsuma peninsula, facing Kagoshima Bay (also known as Kinko Bay). As the political and commercial centre of territory controlled by the Shimazu clan of samurai through medieval times and into the Edo period (1603–1867) when it became the capital of the Satsuma Domain.
Satsuma was one of the wealthiest and most powerful fiefdoms, and though international trade was banned for much of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, the city remained prosperous. It also served as the political centre for the semi-independent vassal kingdom of Ryūkyū, whose traders and emissaries frequented the city. Kagoshima had also been a significant centre of Christian activity before the religion was banned in the late sixteenth century.
The Royal Navy bombarded Kagoshima in 1863 after the daimyō of Satsuma refused to pay an indemnity to compensate for the murder of Charles Lennox Richardson on the Tōkaidō highway the previous year and the city was the birthplace and last stand of Saigō Takamori at the end of the Satsuma Rebellion in 1877. More significantly in the long term, nineteen young men from Satsuma broke the Tokugawa Shogun’s ban on foreign travel, travelling to England and the United States to study Western science and technology, an adventure that did much to kickstart Japan's industrial revolution. There’s a statue outside the train station paying tribute to them.
Kagoshima was also the birthplace of Tōgō Heihachirō whose role as Chief Admiral of the Grand Fleet of the Imperial Japanese Navy in the Russo-Japanese War produced startling victories in 1904 and 1905, destroying Russian naval power in the East, and contributing to the failed 1905 revolution in Russia.
The city’s status as a significant naval base and position as a railway terminus saw a mass bombing raid on the night of 17 June 1945 that deposited over eight hundred tons of incendiary and cluster bombs destroying over forty per cent of the built-up area. Today, Kagoshima produces a wealth of agricultural and marine produce, is home to sophisticated electronic technologies and is the only prefecture with a rocket launching facility, which assembles the cream of modern science. In March 2004, the city became the southern end of the Shinkansen bullet train network, with services terminating at Kagoshima-Chuō.
Recent upgrades mean Kagoshima is now eighty minutes from Fukuoka (Hakata if you want to split hairs). It’s around two and a quarter hours to Hiroshima, just under three and a half to Okayama, just over four to Osaka in the heartland of the Kansai Region and between seven and eight hours to Tokyo depending on the particular service you choose to use. That involves a combination of the Tokaido, San'yo and Kyushu Shinkansen lines so there are a variety of permutations and combinations. There doesn’t seem to be a single service that runs straight through.
The day's travel proceedings involved, in Madam's words, a big train day, though given our location at the very end of the Shinkansen network you might question how that was possible. The answer to your question, of course, involved local lines, and while I knew this was the case there was nothing in the lead up to departure to suggest there was anything much out of the ordinary.
Now, had I been a bit more thorough in my pre-trip research I might have known I was in for something special once we'd partially retraced our steps on the Shinkansen network and alighted at Shin-Yatsushiro, but even Madam, who'd planned the day's route and only had us doing this bit because it would deliver us to Hitoyoshi was gobsmacked by what came next.
It wasn't, by all admissions, the most promising of starts. Once we'd alighted at Shin-Yatsushiro and made our way from the Shinkansen section to the much more prosaic surroundings of the local line the first train that appeared was a local stopping at all stations conveyance that was as run down as you might suspect under the circumstances.
We weren't quite in the back blocks, being on the main Shinkansen line, but if you were bound for the boondocks this was the train that would get you there.
And it certainly looked the part.
When our train, the rather splendidly named Trans-Kyushu Express, arrived it was only a cut or two above its predecessor, but once we'd looped back under the Shinkansen line and headed up into the hills you weren't inclined to pay too much attention to your surroundings since your gaze is automatically drawn to the passing landscape, forest-covered ranges with almost vertical slopes that towered above the train as it wound it's way along a river valley.
It wasn't quite as spectacular as the ride between Toyama and Takayama and back down to Nagoya or the run from Nagano down to Nagoya, but those are well known scenic routes. This one, a mere transitory stage before what was to come was, however, bloody magnificent.
We pulled into Hitoyoshi after an hour to find the next train waiting for us.
Now, you don't take a heritage train and give it a full restoration and then run it through a setting that won't attract a clientele, and this section of track, as was the case with the next one, was obviously being niche marketed as a trip for train freaks.
If the prelude was bloody magnificent, these next two stages were absolutely stunning. Given the niche marketing bit, there were stops guaranteed to maximize that appeal, the first at a heritage station that came just before a switchback and a loop up into the mountains and a stop some five or six minutes later that had you looking back at the station you'd just visited.
I stayed on board for that one, but The Photographer, as you'd expect didn't. Her report, once back on board, had Hughesy alighting at every subsequent stop.
There was one at a place whose name translates as Eternal Happiness, where you struck a bell according to you relative deep grebe of absolute contentment. One for merely happy, two for very happy, three for verging on the ecstatic.
Another was the oldest station in Kyushu, though how that worked when you're in the uplands in the centre of the island didn't quite compute.
There was a stop at Yatake station, which dates back to 1909, where an impressive locomotive was stabled in a largish shed beside a stall selling fresh merchandise (Madam invested in some freshly dried mushrooms). In front of the locomotive the train's hostess was holding a train-driver's cap and a board bearing the date, a handy combo for photographic purposes, and offering to take the photo for you.
There was af air bit of that sort of silliness along the way and it was difficult to abstain from involvement.
On a more serious note, since the track was following the route that brought the first trains to Kagoshima, there had obviously been a fair bit of logging and land clearing along the route, and in the most recently cleared areas there seemed to be a significant spread of invasive vines and creepers and other weeds that made the foreground, on frequent occasions along the journey, an eyesore.
Whether the forests will eventually overrun the invaders is, of course, one of those only time will tell scenarios. When the weeds took over the foreground, of course, the natural response was to lift up the eyes to the magnificent backdrop.
The first stage took us from 10:08 to 11:21, and where I'd been expecting some degree of difficulty when we pulled into the station at Yoshimatsu it was obvious the next train wouldn't be going anywhere until the connection had been made.
The next stage, from 11:24 to 12:48 was on a similarly restored rail motor, though the interior decor was, as you'd expect, slightly different and there were a couple of stops at seemingly out of the way onsens to pick up passengers.
Eventually, of course, we found ourselves approaching Kagoshima, and the interest shifted over the water to Sakurajima, the volcano that is to Kagoshima what Vesuvius is to Naples. Conditions throughout the day had been hazy, and the view across the water wasn't the greatest, but the sight had Madam and other camera enthusiasts snapping away with Hughesy happy to leave the snapping to those who had affair idea of what they were doing.
Back at Kagoshima-chuo I was satisfied with the day's activities, and would have been quite happy to have headed back to the hotel, but Madam was determined to get a couple of scenic shots across the bay to Sakurajima, so we headed off on one of the two bus services that offer a scenic loop around the city.
I suppose we could, had the mood taken us, have got on and off at several of the sites around the circuit, the first of which commemorated St Francis Xavier, but there wasn't much of interest on the way around once we'd dismissed Senganen Garden (also known as Isoteien) as a possibility.
We’d passed this particular landscape garden as a possibility when we passed it on the train as we headed along the coast just north of Kagoshima. We were probably doing ourselves out of a major spectacle since the garden’s most striking feature is its use of Sakurajima and Kagoshima Bay as borrowed scenery, but by this point on the trip we were in scenic sensory overload.
In any case, if you’re passing, it’s worth noting that Senganen dates back to1658 and owes its existence to the Shimazu clan, who ruled the Satsuma domain until the end of the feudal age and were early adopters of Western science and technology, as evidenced by the long stone building that stands just outside the main garden area. It was one of the earliest Western style factories in the country and now houses a museum with exhibits about the Shimizu and the early stages of Japan's nineteenth century modernization.
No, as far as Madam was concerned Shiroyama Observatory at the summit of the 107-metre Mount Shiroyama would do us very nicely, thank you. The mountain was once the site of a castle and Shiroyama literally means castle mountain. The castle's ruins at the base of the mountain are now the site of the Reimeikan Museum and were one of the stops we skipped on the way up to the Observatory.
Shiroyama Observatory is (probably rightly) famed for spectacular views across downtown Kagoshima, Kagoshima Bay and Sakurajima and, in fine weather with good visibility, as far as the Kirishima Mountains, but the haze that had been a nuisance in the distance all day really made its presence felt even at this moderately low altitude, and there wasn't a great deal of joy for the photographic fraternity.
The park surrounding the Observatory is also of interest to students of Japanese history, since it was the site of the last battle in 1877's Satsuma Rebellion and local hero Saigo Takamori supposedly made his last stand at Saigo's Cave, another site we passed by on the way up.
A couple of bus services take you around the sights of Kagoshima, so we could have got to a number of them, but opted to head back to the hotel. This travel bit can tend to become wearing.
Dinner that night was in a French establishment on the other side of the main road from the previous night’s pork emporium, and rather impressive it was. That’ll have to do as far as the narrative is concerned because Hughesy, for some reason, missed completing this particular bit of the travelogue in a timely manner, and now, close to a month later the details have vanished from the memory.
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