Kyushu

Although the city I stayed at in southern Japan, Fukuoka, isn't officially in Kyushu but on the southern tip of Honshu, I will count it as if it is in the same league. The daytrips I made from Fukuoka were all to Kyushu and the city has this nice, Medditerranean subtropic feel and climate.



Fukuoka, also called Hakata, is one of the more modern Japanese cities I have seen. Little traditional architecture yet a very nice atmosphere. Fukuoka is easily my second favourite city of Japan right after Tokyo. This is part of a panoramic picture-series I took from the top of a very strange building near the Tenjin Koen (Heaven Field Park).



Ever seen a garden on an office building? Well, here it is! This side of the building is stair-shaped, while the other side just looks like a regular 15-story flat. On each of the 'stairs', which are about one floor in height each, bushes and small trees have been planted, which gives for a very strangely shaped park!



Talking about parks... Fukuoka doesn't have a lot of them, but the ones I saw were modern but nice. Sculptures in all forms, styles and shapes are extremely common in the entire city. I thought this one of the funnier ones.



Hakata is known in Japan for two things: beautiful women and delicious noodles. I haven't really been enjoying the former, but I have been compensating with the latter! Funny thing is, the best ramen (noodle soup) isn't sold in a restaurant or fastfood place, but on the street! During the day, carts like the one above are everywhere in town. At late afternoon, they start folding open to become small but very cosy and very good ramen restaurants! Especially near the park along Doi-dori and along the river banks, these places are extremely common. Bon appetit and don't forget to slurp as loudly as you can!

Back to the modern architecture. The Japanese steal every kind of style they ever chance upon, and make some twenty-five variations upon the themes therein. Small comfort is hat the twenty-sixth time, it is not complete and utter camp and actually looks good. This/these column(s) help(s) support an indoor shopping centre called Eeny Meeny Miney Moe.



Even worse in the modern aspect is Canal City, a large shopping centre in pale red, dark green and yellow-beige of which I still don't know whether it's just so-so and a little dated or just plain ugly. Small comfort, the restaurants inside I visited were quite okay. Nice bonus was a small J-pop band that visited Canal City when I was enjoying(?) my Colonel Saunders there one day.

What can I say? It's green, red and yellow, has a lot of water inside and empties your pockets faster than you can fill them? Sega-Land was nice to have visited (they even had a nice version of Parodius I kept coming back to) but the multitude of clothes shops were not quite my thing.

One of the more impressive daytrips I made from Hakata was the one to Nagasaki. On the site of the so-called hypocentre (the location exactly below the spot where Fat Man exploded), there is now a park. The black marble column in the picture is on the exact spot of the hypocentre. Being there and feeling firsthand what happened there some sixty years ago is an experience that cannot be caught in words. Would the boy on the bike know that he's riding over the graves of thousands of people? I hope he doesn't and some naive part of me hopes that he never will.

The hugest Christian cathedral in all of Asia was only about 600 metres removed from the hypocentre site. Ironically, much of one part of the church survived the huge blast and subsequent heat and fallout. Much later, this part of the cathedral's wall was moved to the hypocentre park. On top of it are statues of Jesus, one of his apostles and angels' faces. I couldn't help but sadly wonder what their granite eyes must have witnessed during those horrible days.

Near the hypocentre park is the Peace Park, which houses a huge Peace Statue from the fifties. To be honest, I think the thing absolutely butt-ugly. That's why I'm posting a picture of another sculpture in the same park. The entire Peace Park is full of statues and sculptures from all over the world, all of course with the peace and 'this never again' theme. I really love this white-marble composition of an Asian woman wrestling herself free from a rock, witnessed by peace pigeons.



There is more to Nagasaki than the bomb, fortunately. Highly interesting to any Dutchman is of course Dejima, the island that has been housing the Dutch trading post in Japan from early seventeenth century till the Meiji Restoration in the second half of the ninteenth century. Yes, even during the period of Japanese Isolation the Dutch were allowed to trade with the Empire, and only they. All this time, the Dutch national tri-color has been waving in Dejima's winds, sometimes the only one in the world!
At this moment, there are extensive efforts to restore the island exactly to the state it was in during the Isolation. About a quarter of the buildings is already built and some five of them have been furnitured in the original way or are being used as a museum. The ultimate goal is to completely restore Dejima in its former glory like it was 200 years ago, but this might take the better part of twenty years.



One daytrip I made was to Karatsu, on the northern shore of Kyushu proper. The small castle and its surrounding gardens were quite fun, but paled in comparison to what I had seen earlier in for example Himeji. What was new and fresh was the long beach of the place. I have been walking along it forabout two hours and on my way I found the bag in the picture. I figure it must've fallen from some kind of ship and at long last washed ashore in Karatsu. Since the Japanese just don't seem to take anything that isn't theirs (yes, theft is almost nonexistent in this country!), I guess it had been lying on the beach for quite some time. I didn't dare to open it — who knows, there might even be body parts inside — but I did take some pictures.

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