Japan 2012: Kagoshima > Osaka

Friday, 9 November 2012

The last last day of the two week rail leg dawned a little later than Hughesy's regular waking hour, and it was around six thirty-two when I surfaced from a rather weird dream involving catering for wedding receptions while obviously working as a primary school teacher and resumed work on the travelogue. Madam surfaced shortly thereafter, announcing an intention to hie herself off to the nearby public onsen, a development that delivered close to an hour's uninterrupted tapping until her return shortly after eight.

With the train scheduled to depart at 11:32 we weren't inclined to do much in the way of pre-departure activity, happy to wander downstairs for a latish breakfast, return to the room to finish packing and check out just before ten. That scenario gave us a leisurely move to the station and a bit of looking around before departure time.

The day before we'd headed down for breakfast just after six-thirty, and found the place close to chockers. Madam's trip out to the onsen had started with an elevator ride that stopped at almost every floor on on the way down as salarymen and other guests sought to indulge in the ¥500 breakfast that seemed to be the Sunn Days Inn gimmick to attract the business clientele.

If it is, then it definitely seems to work, because when she returned and headed to the elevator to take her back upstairs the breakfast room had progressed to the point where there wasn't an actual queue but awaiting list had the next prospective breakfasted being called by name.

On that basis, my decision to tap away rather hurl myself at the shower once she'd been gone more than half an hour could be deemed to be a smart move. We only had the one room card key and I needed it to keep the lights and electricity running, and I wouldn't be able hear someone knocking at the door while I was in the shower, would I?


In any case, a leisurely morning was the order of the day, and I lobbed myself gently towards the shower rather than hurling myself into the rain room. Breakfast on both days was good deal for the ¥500, and you could see why most of the occupants of the hotel's three hundred and fifty plus rooms would be inclined to eat there rather than elsewhere.

Still, it was relatively uncrowded when we made our way downstairs around eight-thirty, hit the breakfast options and wandered back up, passing the impressive display of bottles associated with one of Kagoshima’s other claims to fame, the sweet potato shōchū (imo-jochu). Typically distilled from barley, sweet potatoes, or rice, though it can be made from brown sugar, buckwheat, sesame and chestnut, shōchū is a completely different beast to sake, though if you're in Kagoshima and ask for the latter you'll almost certainly be served shōchū instead. There are, by all accounts, hundreds of different brands, and a fair few of them were represented in the display.

Kagoshima is the only prefecture in Japan that doesn't brew any sake at all, and the spirit dates back to at least the mid-16th century, arriving in the country through Kagoshima from China or Korea. There's a reference in a piece of temple grafitti written by a carpenter in 1559. Apparently the abbot at the particular shrine was less forthcoming with the spirit than his workers would have liked.

Madam had intentions of sampling the local product, but hadn't managed to do so over the preceding day and a half. With plenty of time till the train left she could still have done so, right up to the time we boarded the train, since the Shinkansen platforms at Kagoshima-chuo have bars offering more than a hundred varieties.

Instead, having made our way over to Kagoshima-chuo I set off in search of the statue commemorating the young men from Satsuma who 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. I’d spotted the item in question while Madam was scoping out the transport options between station and hotel, had promptly forgotten all about it the following day but now, with the best part of an hour left till the train departed looking for it was a decent way of killing time.

Had I done a head count I’d probably have found only fifteen there, though the party included a recruit from from Tosa and another fom Nagasaki, and apparently there were a couple of supervisors along for the ride as well. They studied at University College London, and many went on to Oxford and Cambridge before returning home. Among their number was  Mori Arinori, the first Japanese ambassador to the USA and, subsequently,  Minister for Education, Godai Tomoatsu (founder of the the Osaka Chamber of Commerce and the Osaka Stock Exchange) and Terashima Munenori, who went on to become Japan’s Foreign Minister.

With that done there was still time to kill, so we loitered around the station’s shopping precinct, noting a rather interesting poster advertising a newspaper and sending Madam off to perambulate through the local delicacies on sale to the travelling public. As stated elsewhere this kind of thing is an important consideration in a gift-giving culture and she didn’t return empty-handed. Once she’d made her way back with a selection of goodies I took a turn around the same area, somehow managing to arrive in the Shōchū Store, though they didn’t seem to be offering samples.

Aboard the train we were seated on either side of the aisle rather than in contiguous window seats, which coincidentally meant we didn’t have access to the handy electrical socket that comes with said seats.

I’d been hopeful of getting access to the power point along the way since I figured there’d be a turnover of seats along the way, but while the seat beside me was vacant when I boarded it was occupied at one of the first stops by a bloke who appeared to be an academic rather than an itinerant salaryman, and when he got off in Okayama the seat was immediately claimed by another dude who remained aboard until Kobe.

Still, although it ran the batteries on the iPad and the iPod down considerably, I was able to tap away at the travelogue while listening to my own personal playlist, and the four hours passed remarkably quickly.

Arriving in Osaka the contrast with where we'd been was noticeable. Actually, it was more than noticeable, it was remarkable. There'd been plenty of room to move in Kagoshima-chuo, and the shinkansen is a fairly tranquil means of transfer, but having grabbed the Little Red Travelling Bag and made our way to the doorway,  two steps later we were in the antbed turmoil of ShinOsaka. Fortunately there was a mere one stop train ride and a single stop subway transfer to get us to the night's hotel, so we had an opportunity to catch the breath before the evening's appointment with the inimitable Diamond Chef.

That started with a visit to an establishment that delivered a range of little platters which went rather well with beer, a visit to a jazz club where Madam found the featured vocalist was an alumni of her old university. From there we were on to a single malt club and things start to become blurry...

Japan 2012: Kagoshima > Shin-Yatsushiro > Hitoyoshi > Yoshimatsu > Kagoshima

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.

Japan 2012: Hiroshima > Kumamoto > Kagoshima

Wednesday, 7 November 2012

Mention the the largest city in the Chūgoku region of western Honshu and capital of Hiroshima Prefecture and the first thing that will spring to mind is what happened at a quarter past eight on the morning of 6 August 1945.

And so it should, because when American B-29 bomber Enola Gay dropped the bomb they’d nicknamed Little Boy it didn’t just kill around eighty thousand people directly, a figure that rose to somewhere between ninety and one hundred and forty thousand as the effects of injury and radiation took their toll, it changed the world forever and made the world a very scary place indeed for the next quarter of a century or so.

We weren’t as concerned about these matters as the end of the twentieth century rolled around, with the Cold War a distant memory but for a small boy who went to bed each night as the Cuban Missile Crisis and surrounding events saw Soviet Russia and the United States engaged in nuclear brinkmanship the possibility of a global repetition of what happened that morning was terrifying.

It’s not as if I actually wanted to visit the city, it’s more a case of feeling that if the opportunity arose I had to. Here’s where it happened, here’s where things changed and we have to ensure that this never happens again. That’s my perspective, anyway, and I’m convinced that the spectre of Hiroshima and Nagasaki was a major factor in the mindset that shaped the culture of the fifties and early sixties.

But let’s leave that for a moment. Hiroshima has a long pre-atom bomb history and presents a remarkable story of recovery and hope for the future.

Provided, of course, we don’t allow it to happen again.

The city’s name means Wide Island and Hiroshima was founded on the delta formed by the Ota River, flowing out to the Seto Inland Sea in 1589. Mori Terumoto, a powerful warlord made it his capital after leaving Koriyama Castle in Aki Province, built Hiroshima Castle, moved there in 1593 but was on the losing side in the Battle of Sekigahara, which marked the start of the Tokugawa shogunate. Tokugawa Ieyasu gave control of the area to the Asano clan of samurai, who ruled the area until the Meiji Restoration in 1868. Under their rule the city prospered and expanded and their descendants were strong supporters of modernization through the Meiji period, Hiroshima became a major industrial centre as the Japanese economy shifted from primarily rural to urban industries and a busy port.

The Sanyo Railway reached Hiroshima in 1894, and the city was a major military centre during the First Sino-Japanese War with the Japanese government temporarily based there during the war. Emperor Meiji made his headquarters at Hiroshima Castle from 15 September 1894 to 27 April 1895 and the first round of peace talks to end the war was held in Hiroshima in early February 1895.  Hiroshima was a major supply base during the Russo-Japanese War in 1904 and a focal point of military activity when the Japanese government entered the First World War on the Allied side. The Hiroshima Prefectural Commercial Exhibition Hall, constructed in 1915 as a centre for trade and the display of new products was the closest surviving building to the atomic detonation, designated the Genbaku or Atomic Dome, as part of the Hiroshima Peace Memorial Park.

The city was a major military base again during World War II, with large depots of military supplies, and was a key hub for shipping but while there was widespread destruction and hundreds of thousands died in Tokyo and other cities there were no air raids in Hiroshima although students aged eleven to fourteen were mobilized to demolish houses and create firebreaks to protect against potential firebombings.

Just over a month after the bombing the Makurazaki Typhoon (Typhoon Ida) killed and injured another three thousand, destroyed more than half the remaining bridges in the city and added further heavy damage to roads and railroads but Hiroshima was rebuilt with help from the national government that provided financial assistance and land donated previously used for military purposes.

There, in a nutshell, you have the Hiroshima story, and when you walk (or, in our case, travel by tram) through the downtown area on your way to the Atomic Dome you're seeing a remarkable recovery, proof that, if such an event were to happen again, on a small scale, and at the same intensity of blast, recovery might be possible.

On the other hand, as a guide addressing a tour group about ten metres to my left as I stood dabbing at my misty eyes and gazing at the Dome, today's nuclear weapons are much larger and infinitely more powerful. There's a mist over my eyes as I type this, and reflect on a time when a small boy lived in dread that Hiroshima was about to be repeated on a worldwide scale.

But it's a place that needs to be visited, an event that needs to be remembered, and a mid-city environment that has been shaped to deliver a serenity and quiet dignity that's impressive given the awful magnitude of the event it commemorates.

We could have gone further, and made our way into the Peace Museum, but chose instead to walk slowly through the parkland, reflecting on events and trying not to think about events on the other side of the world that will shape the way things go for the next four years.

We were booked on to the 10:51 Sakura 549 service that could have taken us all the way to the day's eventual destination in Kagoshima if we hadn't decided to break the journey in Kumamoto and take a walk around the Castle there, and, as it turned out, it was just as well we hadn't opted to visit the Peace Museum.

There were other places that could well have been worth a visit on a less crowded schedule, including Just north of the city, Fudoin Temple on the east bank of the Ota River is one of the few structures in the area to survive the atomic blast and the The kondo (main hall) is the only designated national treasure in Hiroshima City.  It seems the kondo was originally built in Suo Province and moved to the present site, but based on statues of the Buddha of healing and medicine within the building, it is assumed a temple had already been built by on the site by the end of the Heian period. The kondo is the largest remaining structure in the medieval Kara style, brought from south China in the Kamakura era with Zen Buddhism, in Japan. It boasts beams spanning 7.3 metres and 5.5 metres, and irimoya (a combination of gable and hip roof) with mokoshi (an extra roof). Inside, the dedication in suggests Fudoin was built around 1540.

We could also have visited Shukkeien Garden (literally, shrunken-scenery garden), which dates back to 1620, was started just after the completion of Hiroshima Castle, and features a miniaturized representation of a variety of natural formations and scenic views, depicting valleys, mountains, and forests. There are a number of tea houses around the garden's main pond which offer visitors views of the surrounding scenery and a path which winds around the pond passes through all of Shukkeien's miniaturized scenes, it would probably have been an ideal place to destress after the atomic bomb sites, but we had other fish to fry down Kagoshima way

By the time we'd made our way back to the station, hoofed it back to the hotel, where the checkout time was a very convenient eleven o'clock, collected the backpacks and the Little Red Travelling Bag and made our way back to catch the train we had all of five minutes to spare before departure.

Once on board and under way I was tempted to leave the tapping and just enjoy the scenery, since we were on the left hand side and there were issues with solar glare coming into play, but frequent tunnels made the sightseeing bit difficult and by the time we'd passed through the intervening stops and had hit the tunnel that takes the Shinkansen line onto Kyushu I was well and truly in tap it out mode.

Once we'd made our way through Hakata, however, I was inclined to sit back and enjoy the scenery, which, once we were out of the urban sprawl at the top of the island, tended towards forest-clad ridges with the odd bit of residential and farming activity in the valleys and not much of anything in the steep-sided gorges.

We tend to think of Japan as a highly urbanised country, a teeming ants nest kind of place where they employ people to pack passengers into overcrowded commuter trains, forgetting that 73% is mountainous and therefore relatively safe from urban development and 70% is forest (and natural forest, as opposed to planted forests account for 50% of the country's surface area). Madam and I had spent much of the preceding week and a half working our way around that sort of landscape in the Deep North, the relatively recently colonized Hokkaido and the mountainous centre of the country around Nagano, but I'd expected Kyushu, being in the south and relatively warmer would have been fairly closely settled.


The Shinkansen line, of course, is going to avoid, or go over, urbanized areas, so the bullet train corridor might well be seen as the exception to the rule. Our experience the following day, however (he wrote, two days after the events he's chronicling) suggested that forested ridges are the rule rather than the exception in the centre of the southern part of the island.

The original plan had been to conclude the day's travels at Kumamoto, move on from there through the back blocks to Kagoshima on Thursday and do the big leg back to Osaka on the last day of the two week rail pass, but some sort of complication ruled that one out, and Plan B had a three and three-quarter hour stop in Kumamoto before we moved on to Kagoshima.

The main purpose of the stop was to take a look at Kumamoto Castle, and although only a few structures date back to the castle's construction in 1607, the reconstructed castle is one of the most impressive in Japan, rated alongside the white-walled Himeji and black-walled Matsumoto. With around eight hundred cherry trees, the castle is a popular sakura venue in late March and early April each year and although the keep and most other buildings are reconstructions, the work is high quality and new buildings are continually being added.

The original construction, designed and supervised by Kato Kiyomasa, the feudal lord (daimyo) who ruled the area, took seven years following the Battle of Sekigahara, though its foundations date back to 1467. Because of faithful service to Tokugawa Ieyasu, Kato had been awarded the whole of Kumamoto Prefecture, then known as Higo Province, and constructing Kumamoto Castle was part of his efforts to unify and develop the region.

 Kato built fortifications highly regarded for their defensive capabilities, and a number of castles he designed in Korea during the Imjin War were able to repel much larger forces because of their effective design. Kumamoto Castle, was considered an almost impregnable fortress thanks to its defensive features, particularly the curved stone walls and wooden overhangs, designed as protection against the ninja.

Less than fifty years after it was completed the castle and surrounding area were given to the Hosokawa clan which ruled the area for the next two centuries. Following the Meiji Restoration (1868), the castle played a pivotal role during the Satsuma Rebellion when Saigo Takamori led an uprising against the new government. Kumamoto was the main garrison of government troops in Kyushu, and Saigo attacked the castle in early 1877. Despite being outnumbered government forces were able to withstand a two month siege, forcing the rebel forces to retreat.

The original castle keep burnt down just before the siege, but in 1960 a ferro-concrete reconstruction re-created the exterior and a recreation of the Honmaru Goten Palace, created to celebrate the castle's 400th anniversary opened to the public in 2008.


The original building was one of many destroyed during the Satsuma Rebellion but they’ve gone to great lengths to use original materials and methods in the reconstruction, and the result certainly looks like an accurate recreation of the opulent lacquered rooms in which the daimyo would receive guests.

I’m not generally a fan of reconstructions, but when they’re done this well…

And, apart from the walk through the interior reconstruction there was a highly choreographed samurai show, evidently designed to keep the younger set happy, but a pretty good time was had by all.

 
As far as the city itself is concerned, the other major attraction is Suizenji Koen, a landscape garden built in 1636 by Hosokawa Tadatoshi, the second lord of Kumamoto, as a private retreat. The garden is a network of traditional gardens spanning an area of sixty-five hectares that reproduces the fifty-three post stations of the Tokaido road, which connected Edo with Kyoto during the Edo Period, in miniature form.

Three and a quarter hours with most of them spent exploring the Castle ruled out a visit to the Garden this time around, but ongoing reconstruction at the Castle and the prospect of a walk through that landscape is the sort of thing that could well draw us back to Kumamoto.

Back on the Shinkansen it was a further hour and three-quarters to Kagoshima, where the night's accommodation was a bit further from the station than I would have preferred if we were still lugging the Black Monster, but with the Little Red Travelling Bag in hand we found our way to the tram stop, alighting three stops later to head off into the eating and drinking quarter in search of the Sunn Days Inn, which lay right in the heart of the quarter, a prime destination for the hungry and thirsty salary man.

Having checked in we were out again in fairly short order looking for a particular venue that deals in one of Kagoshima's specialities, black pork. Previous stops, having been fairly close to the station concerned, had mostly been away from prime eating and drinking areas, and when we'd ventured into such territory we were headed for a place where Madam had, more or less, a fair idea of the place's location.

Here we found ourselves wandering along a backstreet, down another, onto one of the city's major thoroughfares, and back a block before we located the place she was looking for. Given the fact that this was, apparently, a highly rated purveyor of prime pork you'd expect it to have been a bit easier to find.

Actually, tucked away at the back of a basement collection of eateries (two of them apparently French) on the edge of the Eating Quarter you'd have expected it to be doing things a little tough, but while we were there a steady stream of customers made their way through the door. Not bad, one would have thought, relatively early on a Wednesday night.

We ended up in a tatami mat cubicle, at the chef's suggestion, rather than seated at the bar, and I was glad we did, since we'd ordered the prime version of the pork, which was cut thicker and consequently took longer to cook.

I downed a substantial pitcher of beer while we were waiting, and I wanted to go another with the meal, a request that was overruled by the wait staff on the grounds that the meal was rather substantial and I wouldn't be able to manage both.

We'd learnt of Obama's re-election in the States on the last leg of the train trip, and I was in a mood to celebrate, so I was quite certain that I could, but Madam advised caution and the avoidance of scenes, so we had to do with the meal, which mightn't have been the largest I've ever tackled but was certainly in the running for the top five.A substantial piece of high quality pork had been crumbed and deep fried, then sliced into substantial chunks and came on a platter with a generous serve of sliced cabbage, a couple of slices of cucumber, a bowel of rice and the seemingly obligatory miso soup.

I'm not miso-friendly, so that was never going to enter calculations, but I made pretty fair work of the pork and my serve of rice. Around a third of the way through we were visited by the chef, who demonstrated the correct way of seasoning the pork.

He started with a healthy sprinkling of a sauce that wasn't too dissimilar to the one I'd disliked the night before and had been avoiding to date in the evening's proceedings, then added a fair dollop of hot English mustard, which I had been indulging in, not in the quantity seemingly required.

The combination worked rather well, and by the time my serve of pork and rice were gone there was only a skerrick of mustard left, which was a problem when Madam advised she'd been beaten by quantity.

There was about a third of her serve left, and a fair quantity of rice which the chef had described as a high quality product from Akita Prefecture in northern Honshu. Under those circumstances I felt obliged to finish both pork and rice, but there was no way I was going to manage the cabbage and still leave room for a celebratory ale or two.

Having completed the repast Madam wasn't inclined to hang around for pitchers of beer, and who could blame her, since she didn't have the capacity to join in the celebrations.

We wended our way back to the hotel, turned on the TV in search of updates on the Obama situation, found we were on the end of the relevant bulletin and settled back to watch a panel discussion about dieting as Hughesy downed a couple of Asahis to celebrate the Presidential result.

Predictably, by around nine-thirty the sawmill was in full production.