The hills are alive alright, but it ain't the sound of music.   Kyushu, Japan's southern most island (other than Okinawa), is still actively volcanic.  In fact, Sakurajima-san has covered the large port city of Kagoshima with a coat of ash on more than one occasion.  But the rewards of volcanic soil are lush green forests and grasslands, which makes Kyushu seem like a tropical paradise.  It's not what the average person thinks of when he thinks of Japan.

We came to Fukuoka (also known as Hakata) by Shinkansen, about nine hours from Tokyo on the Hikari (the express train).  We, however, had stopped at a few places on the way, so it wasn't such a shock for us to notice the difference.   Where Tokyo feels like an open-all-night, all-you-can eat city, Fukuoka is more of a my-hometown, let's-take-it-slow town.  In the middle of summer, the food stalls were rolled out on the roadside, where you could get fresh Kyushu seafood or a big bowl of ramen.

This page is called "Kyushu" because our hosts (Jayne's family, of course) were so gracious to us, that we actually did an East-West cross island tour of Kyushu in the four days we stayed with them.  That included Nagasaki and Arita in the west, and Beppu in the east.  They invited us back to do the North-South tour next; we plan to take them up on their offer this summer.

Nagasaki was the first port opened for trading with Europeans, the Dutch, in the 14th century.  With the Dutch came Christianity, and before long, Christianity had caught on pretty well and was spreading over to Korea, which is only a two hour boat ride from Kyushu.  However, Japan was still very much a feudal society at this time, and when Tokugawa came to power and decided to unite Japan, he did not invite the Dutch to the party.  So he ungraciously threw them out of Japan, and those left behind (mostly missionaries) were murdered, along with thousands of Japanese converts.

Nagasaki today is an interesting mix of Japan and Dutch culture, the Dutch mostly seen in the architecture, and art, not the society.  Nagasaki, like Yokohama, has a thriving Chinatown as well.  We didn't spend too much time there; just enough to eat dim sum in Chinatown and visit the Atomic bomb memorial (a huge statue of a man sitting in a strange position.  Supposedly symbolic of something or another, but too difficult for most people to explain.)

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There were many other places we visited in Kyushu.  On the east coast is Beppu, a "resort" town of sorts for Japanese who love their onsen (hot springs).  Beppu is a highly volcanic area, so there are literally hundreds of hot springs around this city.  Many of them are sulphuric, so basically the town smells like rotten eggs everywhere you go.  If that's you're idea of a vacation resort, then please enjoy Beppu.

We also went through a drive through safari, the kind where the animals roam free and you stay in your car.  Interesting, until you read the stories about the genius people who roll down their windows to pet the animals and end up being eaten by tigers.  We had no such incident, but the signs did warn us that tigers sometimes chase down cars and bite the tires.

Lastly, we went to a little town that basically was a large shrine.   Dazaifu is the name of the place, and like all shrines, there were some beautiful buildings and cute little shops around it.  Apparently, some kind of festival is held there in the Spring, but I never found out exactly what it was.

In Fukuoka, we came just before a big parade, and the floats they were building for this parade were on display on all the street corners of the city.   And what floats they were, many of them standing over 20 feet tall.  It was explained to me that two floats would be built; the one on display was simply for display purposes, and a smaller version of the same float would be built and carried down the street for the parade (they do not drive their floats down the street like we do in the US; a couple dozen strong men carry them on their backs).

NEW!   More Kyushu in 1999!

A float for the parade in Fukuoka.

What's that odor?  Oh, it's Beppu!

Ceremony at Dazaifu shrine.

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