鹿児島 Kagoshima

There wasn't much time to spend down in Kagoshima but just seeing the active volcano Sakurajima and getting ash dumped on me all afternoon was enough. Apparently the volcano's been spewing a lot of smoke and ash lately and the city had little piles of gritty black soot everywhere. It used to be an island but a 1914 major eruption turned it into a peninsula and buried parts of the place in lava flows.

I'm not sure living next to something like that would be good for your health...It would clear up but then the wind would change and you could just see this grey cloud coming towards the city and within 15 minutes or so you'd start getting grit in your eyes and mouth...

There are continuous ferries that take only 15 minutes to get over to the volcano which has a number of developments and small town areas around it. At 150 yen it costs less than a streetcar ride in Kagoshima. Kagoshima, like Fukuoka, seems like a more balanced city with open areas, parks, playgrounds, etc.

福岡 Fukuoka Day 2

Today I met up again with my friend only this time she brought her sister and (ちょうかわいい) extremely cute 2 year old niece. We went to Dazaifu and visited a temple, did a bit of sightseeing, and watched her niece being adorable (she can definitely say "happy!" and "byebye!"), before heading back to Fukuoka to check out a park with many sakura in full bloom, and Fukuoka tower which had some pretty amazing views (you get discounted admission if you're not Japanese!). Again I have to thank her and her sister for their hospitality.

福岡 Fukuoka Day 1

After Tsuwano I headed south a couple hours to Fukuoka (Tenjin) and met up with a friend in the area. She very graciously showed me around and let me not have to worry about deciphering the transit system here. We stumbled into a Yabusume (horse mounted archery) display, then took a waterway/canal cruise in Yanagawa 柳川. According to Wikipedia, in the 80s Studio Ghibli made an animated documentary on the history of Yanagawa's waterways. The sakura are in full bloom down here in Kyushu so there were plenty of hanami parties going on. Hanami means "cherry blossom viewing" but in reality it's, "cherry blossom viewing while sitting on a blue tarp and drinking (with some eating and activities for the kids). Some kind old drunk gentlemen even invited me to join them while we passed by on the river tour (2nd hanami invite that day, I stand out here apparently). We passed a 3 boat long wedding party on the tour making it the 2nd wedding I've randomly run across here.

Yanagawa is also famous for its unagi so afterwards we had some unagi then met up with a few of her friends for a good dinner at an Izakaya near my hotel. The night was almost entirely in Japanese so a lot of it was hard to understand but it was still really fun (2 people mostly fluent in Japanese and English, one Japanese only speaker, and me). Oh, and her friends knew what cat cafe's are and pointed out that there was at least one in the area so it's apparently not just an Akihabara thing!

津和野 Tsuwano

After leaving Hiroshima it was on to probably the most remote part of the trip in a tiny mountain town called Tsuwano. While waiting for the first train of the trip I ran into a couple from Ocean Beach of all places who were going to the same place for similar reasons (few tourists, off the beaten path, etc.). Small world...After the first leg of the trip I was going to have to get a ticket on a normal train line. Oddly enough starting in March each year there is a "special" train that is apparently a big tourist draw that runs once per day...and that's how I ended up on what I hope is the last steam powered train in Japan. It took 2 hours and there were *lots* of professional photographers camped out on scenic spots of the route. The townspeople at each stop all came out to wave at the train and we even had cars pace the train while filming...When they had to re-stoke(?) the coal the train would stop for a few minutes, everyone would get out and take photos, then run back inside the cars.

Anyway Tsuwano is a town that seems to subsist mostly on tourism. It has some really old castle ruins overlooking the whole valley area, more carp in streetside waterways than people, and a couple Catholic churches which is pretty odd for Japan. It was very picturesque and the weather was finally warming up a little bit. The sculpture photo here represents dancers dressed up as herons however they look like something the Silent Hill series could run with...

京都 Kyoto

The shrines here really understand moss. It's everywhere and one that I stopped at even had samples and species names of all the moss they have on the premises. They also really get landscape architecture. I can't recall the guy's name but hundreds(?) of years ago he designed the gardens of at least several of the major shrines in the area and they are pretty impressive. The paths are all meticulously lined with bamboo and trees are propped and trimmed perfectly to barely not be in your way.

広島 Hiroshima

I've stopped off in Hiroshima for a day to see what was ground zero for the first atomic bomb attack on humankind, and eat Okonomiyaki. The building, numerous monuments, and the museum are all absolutely worth seeing. The weather was in the low 40s, windy, with occasional light rain letting up an hour or so after I got here...in other words it may look like an ok day in the pictures but everyone was saying, "さむい。　そとさむい！” so it wasn't just me. I kept finding somewhere indoors to thaw before heading back outside.

The tour groups of Japanese were interesting. I'm not sure if there are sports tournaments which are good excuses to go tour but all the high school age groups seem to have track suits from Adidas or some other brands. Also, this is from back in Kyoto but every school sports club seems to have their own uniforms or bags, like for handball or archery teams. When you belong to something you definitely show it off everywhere.

Tomorrow it's off to Tsuwano, a place most Japanese seem to not have heard of and that's a good thing. There shouldn't be much there and there are supposedly more fish than people in the town's waterways. Even the weather channel doesn't know of it's existence but there really is a train stop there.

伏見稲荷大社 Fushimi Inari Taisha

If you've seen the cover of Memoirs of a Geisha then you've seen one tiny piece of this sprawling shrine. More than a third of the Shinto shrines in Japan are dedicated to the god Inari, and this one is the oldest, and largest, dating back over a thousand years. There are thousands upon thousands of torii lining almost every pathway here, each donated by a Japanese business due to the nature of the shrine. The Inari stop on the JR Nara line dumps you out right in front of this shrine. The fox statues all over the place were pretty cool. With the rain there were very few people around. Some of the open shops up in the temple were pretty much unstaffed...