Unzen to Kumamoto

We were up early (Andrea has been an unbelievably pleasant riser the entire trip) for the next leg of our journey. From Unzen we caught a bus to the Shimabara Ferry, where we took a high speed ferry across to Kumamoto.  Unzen National Park (which was Japan's first) was established in 1934.   It is home to Mount Unzen, an active volcano that last erupted about 20 years ago killing 41 people.  I'll post a picture below that we took from the ferry.

A word about the weather.  We have totally lucked out.  Last night it rained - really the first rain we had have had on our trip.  It started right around the time we bathed last night and stopped shortly before we left the hotel for our bus ride.  And what had been predicted to be a rainy Saturday turned out to be picture perfect.  Not a cloud in the sky and cool temperatures.

The timing worked great and the ferry left about 15 minutes after our bus got us to the terminal.  It was interesting - the interior was reminiscent of a bad Vegas wedding chapel, fake flowers and all.

But of course is was all about what was outside, and Shimabara Bay has both mountains and islands to view as you travel across.  And you could look back to see Mt. Unzen, the volcano.  Here's a couple of photos, one of which actually proves that we are here and together.

We got to Kumamoto, dropped out bags off at the hotel and began sightseeing in earnest.  First, a garden.  We have not done well so far with gardens, so Suizenji Koen came as a pleasant change.  It is small and most definitely tucked into an urban setting, but the good news is that finally the cherry trees were in bloom.  The rest of the garden was pretty standard Japanese fare - some sculpted pine trees, bodies of water, rocks and stones, lots of fat carp - the usual.  But it was really nice weather and a nice afternoon walk.

For those who may be wondering, there are no longer oysters harvested in Kumamoto.  We are not exactly sure why - we have seen references to "improper handling" and "pollution."  But they did originate here.  They are now grown in the Pacific Northwest.

Both of us remarked today how many kids we saw being carried by either a parent or even a grandparent.  It seemed a little odd.   Sometimes they were in carriers, but often it was just the old fashioned way, either on the hip or occasionally even saddled up on the carrier's back.

Kumamoto is probably best know for its castle, purportedly one of the top three castles in Japan.  Built in the 15th and 16th centuries (although today's structures are in large part reconstructions of the original), it is massive and is the centerpiece for an area that includes art museums, craft museums and old residences of significance.  On a lovely spring day, it was also a magnet for thousands of visitors.  We "did" the castle as well as a samurai residence at the edge of the grounds.  Then we called it quits, having had a pretty full day of travel and sightseeing.

Ureshino to Unzen

A travel day today, with our final destination being Unzen, a sulfurous hot springs located in a national park on the Shimabara Peninsula not far from Nagasaki.

After breakfast at the Taishoya, we proceeded to check out and catch a bus to our next destination.  As the bus station was only two blocks from the ryokan, we planned to just roll our suitcases over.  The staff at the hotel would hear nothing of it and insisted on taking us over.  Well, they did so in style, as the pictures below attest.

After that start, it's no surprise that it was downhill from a transportation standpoint.  The bus to our train was a local city bus that was uncomfortable and, we thought, a bit expensive for what we got.  We made it to the train station just in time, and the train portion of the trip was quite nice.  It was an express train on the Nagasaki line that, although not a Shinkansen, was very comfortable and fast.  We then had to switch to a local bus to get to Unzen.  The bus station was rundown and had very few (read - no) amenities.  We caught our bus, which was also a bit rundown, for the last leg into Unzen.  In any event, we are here.

Unzen, as I mentioned above, is a sulfuric hot springs and the smell is just part of the town (the locals say they can't smell a thing!).  Bathing in the hot spring water is said to have beneficial healthful effects.  We'll see.  The town itself is a little run down and has a a sad feel to it.  We went for a walk and stopped at a little place for a snack where it wouldn't have surprised either of us if we were the only customers of the day.   Although the town is full of hotels offering hot spring baths, it doesn't really have an upscale, vibrant feel to it.  The pictures below are of our hotel and of one of the springs (jigoku, the are called, which means "hell" in Japanese).

Now in case there is any confusion, you don't actually bathe in the spring itself.  The water from the springs is  piped down to the baths in the hotels.  We plan to try the bath after dinner and will report later.

OK, it's later.  Much later in fact.  The bath was good.  Both Andrea and I were afraid that the sulfuric nature of the water would give off a nasty smell in the bath.  It did not.  And the water felt good.

A Brief Note on Pottery

We have seen some beautiful pottery on our trip.  And, I am learning, that some can be distinguished by the place in which it is produced (particularly the effect of local clay).  The amazing thing to me in seeing it is how expensive much of it is.  Now of course there is machine-made, everyday pottery, probably like what we would see in China Fair back home.  But the stuff we are seeing - which people presumably buy to use - can cost $50 for a small sake bottle or $30 for a small dish.  And the number of dishes used at each meal can add up.  Admittedly we have been eating in upscale settings, but it is not uncommon at the end of dinner to have used 20 or more separate dishes, many such as soup bowls or fish bowls with covers.  So the cost to maintain (and store) all of these dishes must be enormous - not to mention cleaning up after the meal!

Karatsu to Ureshino

Thursday we traveled to Ureshino, a spa town a little farther south in Kyushu.  Catching an early train (9 o'clock), we made another train connection before arriving in Takeo Onsen, where we took a bus to Ureshino.

We had a little time to wait at the train station.  There was a coffee shop, so I decided to have a cup.  What an elaborate vacuum apparatus to make a cup of coffee - I wasn't familiar with the process.  They poured water in a round beaker and then ground coffee that sat in another test tube-like thing in the beaker.  It took what seemed like forever to get the coffee and (after paying about $4 for it) I was expecting something out of this world.  The Starbucks Via that I made my first day in Japan was better.  So much for fancy apparatus.

We interrupted our bus trip to stop at Keishuen, a garden in Takeo Onsen.  What a disappointment. The plum trees had just bloomed while everything else had not yet started.  While on that subject, we have seen very few cherry blossoms yet.  It must have been a relatively tough winter in Japan and things are blooming a little bit later than normal.  So we are hoping out luck changes and the weather warms up.

Our ryokan in Ureshino is a modern building that looks pretty hideous from the outside.  Inside, though our room is quite nice, overlooking a peaceful garden.  That seems to be a theme with may ryokan - no matter what it looks like on the outside, inside it is a totally transformed experience of peacefulness and beauty.  

We visited a tea factory outside Ureshino this afternoon.  Besides getting a tour of the facility, we were chatted up immensely by one of the women who worked there in the retail shop.  She had such a warm and wonderful personality.  We have found that at every point of the trip so far.  People have been so gracious and warm in wishing to make sure we are enjoying ourselves.  It certainly erases any image of Japanese people as taciturn and reserved.  They really can't be nicer.

We are off to one of the outdoor hot spring baths this afternoon.  Should be wonderful with cool and pleasant temperatures in the air and the 105+ degree bath.  Turns out that the bath was ok, not great.  The most interesting thing was the beer dispensing machine they had in the little lounge.  You take a regular beer glass, put in in a cradle and press the button.  The glass tips and the machine starts dispensing beer, tipping the glass upright as the glass fills.  It takes it right to the top before getting upright, then showers some foam on the top. It is to bartending what Fast Lane is to toll collecting.  The bartenders' union in the US better hope this wonderful advancement doesn't work its way across the Pacific.  :-)

Karatsu, Imari, Arita

Wednesday is pottery day.  The ryokan has arranged for a guide whom we will meet at 1 o'clock and she will take us to see the pottery sites in Imari and Arita.  Pottery is huge around here (Karatsu is known for its type of pottery as well).

This morning after breakfast I set out on a walk through Niji No Matsubara, a 360-year old black pine forest along Karatsu Bay planted by the feudal lord Teresawa.  It is said to consist of 1 million trees, planted to protect against the winds and tides of Karatsu Bay.  Two things were interesting about it.  First, virtually all of the trees bend away from the water, giving it a very crooked look.  Second, there seemed to be no other species of tree in the forest at all, which struck me as odd (and a bit unnatural).  It was obvious that the forest is well taken care of - there was evidence of sticks and pine needles having been cleaned up.  But for no other species of tree to have taken root in this sandy soil was just odd.  We later learned that the prefecture or city cleans it out to keep it that way.  Here is what it looks like.

At 1 o'clock our guide for the day arrived.  Her name is Yuki Sakamoto.  This wonderful young woman is an English teacher at a private school and volunteers (she says only once or twice a year) to take visitors, principally English speaking ones, on tours around the area.  Yuki had gone to university in Hiroshima, and spent a year studying in Northern Ireland.  Yuki took us to the pottery towns of Imari (actually to Okawachiyama) and then to the prefectural museum in Arita, where thousands of pieces of pottery are on permanent display.  Probably the highlight of the afternoon was a visit to a friend of Yuki's, Katsuro Yokota, who is a potter in Arita.  We visited with him and his wife at their home, which is also his workshop where he has two kilns.  Katsuro is quite a Renaissance man - he roasts his own coffee, and he and his wife run a little coffee shop on the weekends.  Andrea had a fabulous time conversing away in Japanese - her Japanese is every bit as good as Yuki's English.

Tomorrow it is on to Ureshino, a spa town a little farther south.

Dining at Yoyokaku

Dinner is served in our room at our ryokan Yoyokaku.  Our room is actually two separate rooms - one is 8 tatami mats, the other is 6.  There is a sitting area that looks out into the garden, along with a bathroom with a shower and bath.  The larger communal bath is located elsewhere in the ryokan - big washing areas and large soaking tub.  The water is incredibly hot.  Andrea loved it (so she told me - the baths are single sex); I found it somewhat relaxing but too darn hot.

Our dinner was the traditional kaiseki of 8 or 10 courses prepared in different ways - boiled, raw, steamed, grilled and fried (tempura).  We had specified that we wanted fish and they did not disappoint.  The first course included an aji (horse mackerel) sashimi in a delicate, but spicy sauce that was out of this world.  We also had a saw-toothed perch sashimi that was delicious.  The tempura dish was "top shell," with which I was not familiar, but I Googled it and it appears to be some sort of snail.  That was served with a fried pepper as well called shishito.  The meal was finished with a rice course (a little boring) and then a melon for dessert, the type of which I was not familiar.

This morning's breakfast was traditional Japanese.  A variety of pickled items, grilled fish, tofu, a custard, miso soup with clams, special cherry tomatoes, a barley gruel.  They kindly brought me coffee instead of the obligatory green tea.

Second night dinner was the same idea.  A lot more sashimi this time (Andrea points out they call it the "raw course"), which we both enjoyed.  The top shell that we had the other night was served the second night was as good and interesting raw as it was in a tempura batter.

A couple of pictures will say a thousand words.

Karatsu

First real day of the trip.  We were out of the hotel by 9 o'clock and off for the train to Karatsu.  The temperature was in the high 40s and clear as a bell.

The train ride to Karatsu was along the coast and some views along the way were quite scenic.  Frequently, though, it is incredible how ugly the modern, character-less, post-war buildings and utility lines everywhere can be.  And it seems so incongruous in a country that is otherwise so focused on aestherics.  We arrived in Karatsu and got a ride to our ryokan - Yoyokaku.

Having missed breakfast, we immediately set out to see Karatsu and find something to eat.  Having "done" the town, we both felt a little sorry for Karatsu.  One of the guidebooks refers to its depopulation and how that has resulted in Karatsu failing to deliver on its promise as the tourist destination it once was.  There was a hangdog, downtrodden feel to the city.  Many businesses closed down, no real vibrant commercial feel.  We even had a little trouble finding a place to eat, although we ended up at a nice little place where we had okonomiyaki (a cross between an omelet and a pancake, which we had with squid and shrimp).

But things picked up.  We visited an exhibition at a kiln/gallery of Nakazato Taroemon, a famous potter who is the 13th in a line of potters in his family.  His son is 14th.  Karatsu is still noted for its pottery and the pieces we saw were beautiful.  Next stop was the Exhibition Hall, where they keep these totally cool floats that are used in a parade in the Festival of the Karatsu Shrine each November.  The various neighborhoods of Karatuse are responsible for the floats, which were built in the mid-19th century, and they field a bunch of volunteers to operate it during this three-day festival.

Finally, we visited a beautiful residence of an industrialist that is now owned by the city and operated as a museum.  A tour guide attached himself to us and began to give us the tour in good, but a little broken, English.  As we moved along and he heard Andrea's Japanese, the tour quickly became a Japanese language one with Andrea occasionally leaning over to let me know what was going on!  Seriously, he was very proud of the house, and gave the tour enthusiastically.  It is really amazing to see these beautiful homes with such a clean aesthetic and totally devoid of clutter (indeed, with in many cases no furniture to speak of) - one can only wonder the simple way in which they lived.

We walked back to the ryokan, making it back by 4:30 - a full afternoon.

Fukuoka

We made it to Fukuoka and, despite the fact that we had been traveling go 18 straight hours with only a little sleep, we took the subway into the city (it's really easy).  We stopped first at the train station to pick up our rail passes.  The only reason I mention it is that the employees of the railway companies are so polite - dressed in clean uniforms and, when they leave your presence to go to the back room for some paperwork, they exit walking backwards, bowing as they leave.

Our hotel (Hotel Okura Fukuoka) is modern and very nice.  The bellman (actually is was a young girl, but bell girl didn't seem apt) was really taken in a very sweet way by Andrea's facility with Japanese.  After we had gone out of the hotel (more on that later), when we returned she left her post to greet us and walked us to the elevator, chatting us up (or at least chatting Andrea up with me playing Charlie McCarthy!).

The eel restaurant we wanted to go to was closed, but the original one, from which this one was spawned, was a short walk away.  We decided to go out.  The walk there was through an "entertainment" district in Fukuoka - lots of clubs, bars, dance places, etc.  A lot of activity for a Monday night.  Hostesses - who appeared to us at first to be "working girls" - stood outside these establishments urging patrons in.  The patrons appeared to be mostly Japanese businessmen, usually in groups of three or four, a number of whom seemed to have been pretty drunk.  It was all a little sketchy if you ask me.

Tuesday on to Karatsu.  The weather is gorgeous.  Yay!

The eel restaurant was great.  A real hole in the wall, with seats at a bar for 5 and three booths that could accommodate 8 more people.  When we arrived, there were 4 businessmen at the bar, finishing up a night on the town.  The place was the "real deal."  No English menu and no English spoken.  But good eel on rice and a beer hit the spot after what was not pushing 20+ hours of traveling.

Arrival in Japan

It was an uneventful, but long, 13 ½ hour flight from DC to Tokyo.  We left at noon and the entire journey is in daylight.  People pull their shades down to let others sleep.  I might have gotten an hour or two of sleep.  Andrea, who can sleep just about anytime and anywhere, logged a few more.  We had a couple of hour layover at Narita before our flight to Fukuoka.  I am writing on the flight – a 737 that has more seats bolted into it than I have ever seen.  The legroom (and overall comfort) is reminiscent of the old grandstand seats at Fenway.  Fortunately the flight isn’t crowded, although it was uncharacteristically 45 minutes late in taking off. I will say, though, that the lavatory in the plane is utterly spotless - you could eat a meal in it (that is, of course, if they served meals on the plane, which they do not).

Andrea brought an extra, empty carry-on suitcase on the flight – the idea being to have something to fill up with purchases made while she is in Kyoto.  Rather than continue to schlep it with us the entire trip, we just had it sent to our hotel in Kyoto to coincide with our arrival on April 5^th.  They have numerous baggage services at the airport that will transport luggage relatively inexpensively all over Japan.  It only cost $18 to send her bag.  It is one of many amenities that travelers enjoy in Japan.

We had hoped to get into Fukuoka in time to get out to an eel restaurant that Andrea identified that is near our hotel.  

Getting Ready

Less than two weeks to go before we leave for Japan.  Having last time traveled the length and breadth of Honshu (with a side trip to Shikoku), this time we are off to the island of Kyushu at the southern end of the country.   Although the timing can always be tricky, we are attempting to catch the cherry blossoms when they are in maximum bloom.  We will report along the way on how well that worked.

Andrea has done her usual fabulous (and need I say thorough) job of planning every detail of the itinerary.  I won't go through it here, other than to say that it involves train travel, staying in ryokans, visiting pottery places and finding every garden that we can.  It does not, unsurprisingly, involve nature walks or strenuous hikes up volcanic peaks.

We'll be in Kyushu from March 26th through April 4th.  Then we'll go up to Kyoto where we will spend 3 or 4 days until I head back to Boston.  Andrea will stay on in Kyoto for another couple of weeks, like last time.

One aspect of the trip preparation on which we have been very focused is the luggage.  Last trip we found that the bags we brought were a little too large, particularly at some of the smaller train stations with no escalators or lifts.  So, we resolved this time to pack lighter and fit everything into a domestic carry-on bag with wheels.  It may mean doing some laundry along the way, but we hope to benefit from the lighter load.  We'll see.