onsen, homestays and candy treats alongside Japan’s Sugar Road

This article was produced by National Geographic Traveller (UK).

The shoji display door slides closed behind me. The room is sun-dappled — paper door and latticework partitions letting mild in whereas protecting prying eyes out. My footwear have been spirited away and the tatami ground is cool underfoot, its summer-hay scent hanging within the air. The rush grass used for the flooring, I’m informed, comes from neighbouring Kumamoto Prefecture. The latticework carpentry forming the partitions and arched ceilings are Okawa Kumiko model, originating in Fukuoka, which is the place I at the moment discover myself. Although not for for much longer. At the blow of a whistle, this room will quickly be on the transfer. The delicate confection of paper, wooden and grass is, actually, inside a practice.

A white-gloved guard offers the sign, and we’re off. All aboard the 36+3, a luxurious black-and-gold-trim practice inaugurated by the Kyushu Railway Company in 2020. Operating on 5 routes round Kyushu, it’s the imaginative and prescient of Eiji Mitooka, the economic designer accountable for a number of heritage trains that crisscross Japan’s third-largest island on sightseeing itineraries. Subtropical at its southern reaches, Kyushu is the southernmost of the nation’s 4 foremost islands, almost nearer to South Korea and Shanghai than Tokyo. Until 2004, once they turned stops on the Shinkansen bullet practice community, Kyushu’s ports and airports have been higher related to Taiwan and mainland Asia than a lot of Japan. And it wasn’t till 2022 that the bullet practice began working in Kyushu’s far-western reaches.  

The Shinkansen would possibly supply a speedy connection to Tokyo, however Kyushu’s complete native rail community calls for you sluggish issues down. And with fares within the 36+3’s standard-class carriages — almost as ornate as my first-class compartment — costing little greater than a commuter practice ticket, it’s an accessible luxurious. First-class eating, although, is price paying additional for. Lunch brings an extravagant bento field, courtesy of chef Shugo Nagaoka, from Michelin-starred Nagaoka restaurant in Fukuoka — slivers of Wagyu beef from the encompassing Saga Prefecture, floral scrolls of lotus and taro root, and a rainbow of sashimi, drawn from native waters. Framed in a bamboo field, it’s almost too lovely to eat. Even the soy sauce is exquisitely offered in a tiny dish from the close by city of Arita, the birthplace of Japanese porcelain.

I go up a glass of native sake in favour of some inexperienced tea — Kyushu is one among Japan’s foremost producers; it was first launched to the nation by a Chinese Buddhist monk passing by the island within the twelfth century. But when the practice makes a sightseeing cease on the city of Hizen Hamashuku, the fermented rice drinks are more durable to withstand. Along its Sake Brewery Street, preserved homes from the Edo period (1603 to 1867) — all whitewash, shoji doorways and ornate, black-clay roof tiles — supply an atmospheric place for tastings. 

Under cedar-beamed brewery ceilings, I strive award-winning Daiginjo — the highest grade of sake, made with the mineral-rich freshwater that flows from close by Mount Taradake, mashed with the Saga Prefecture’s premium Yamada Nishiki rice.

There’s a mild sweetness to the sake right here — notably at venerable producer Minematsu Shuzo. “Everything is just that little bit sweeter in Kyushu,” says my information, Kaoru ‘Kay-san’ Shibata, as we tour the brewery’s sake vats. “Have you tried our soy sauce yet? It’s darker and sweeter than the kind you get out east.”

Sugar Road tales

Kyushu has a protracted historical past of sending candy stuff east. In the early sixteenth century, the Portuguese launched sugar to Japan through the island’s southwestern port of Nagasaki. Hizen Hamashuku is one among 25 staging-post cities alongside the Nagasaki Kaido, or Sugar Road, that winds 141 miles from Nagasaki by central Kyushu to the island’s northernmost metropolis of Kitakyushu. As sugar discovered its manner east to the remainder of Japan, ryokan guesthouses, breweries and confectioners grew up alongside the route. “During the isolation era, Nagasaki was the one Japanese port open to foreign trade,” says Kay-san. “Kyushu was Japan’s only contact with the outside world — lots of things came and went along this route,” she says with a wry smile. 

The ruling Tokugawa shogunate of the seventeenth century closed the nation’s borders to stem the rising tide of Christianity, however in the course of the two centuries of isolation that adopted, international customs, courtesans and all method of candy issues nonetheless discovered passage alongside the Sugar Road. Had I stood right here within the 1800s, my fellow travellers might nicely have included camels and elephants — unique imports making their method to Edo (modern-day Tokyo) for the shoguns’ pleasure. In the close by city of Ogi, I strive yokan, a jelly-like candy made with azuki bean paste in jewel-like ruby and jade colors. “If you go to any house in Kyushu, you’ll be offered one of these,” says Kay-san. “We’ve been eating them to this recipe for hundreds of years.”

My mattress for the evening additionally feels prefer it’s from a bygone period. I go away the practice on the scorching springs city of Takeo Onsen and head for the hills. Following the Oniki rice fields as they step as much as meet the mountains, I discover Oniwa homestay. With its wooden and wattle-and-daub partitions, it’s an almost sepia-tinged scene. My host, Yukono Takuma, greets me, wearing an old-fashioned scarf and pinafore. After we kick off our footwear, Takuma reveals me into the kitchen, previous a standard Japanese kamado clay oven and right into a lounge the place display doorways open onto a stage-like deck jutting over the rice terraces. It’s a theatrical reveal that produces an open-mouthed “wow” from me that wants no translation for my non-English-speaking host.

“The house isn’t entirely old,” says Takuma, as we piece a dialog collectively utilizing telephone translation apps. “Parts of it are. We’ve added reclaimed pieces. It took two years to finish.” It’s a triumph of clever but deeply rustic design. I sink right into a basket chair on the deck, a misty pre-twilight bringing utter stillness to the terraces patchworked steeply down the slender valley, densely forested mountains seeming to collect as they darken above. It’s a mesmerising dose of satoyama — the Japanese time period for a transitional house between the man-made and the wild. The common sound of children being referred to as for dinner lastly brings me spherical. 

This is an Airbnb that comes with a household meal on the irori, a sunken fireplace round which households collect, cooking over wooden embers within the centre, eating on the edge and sitting with legs tucked beneath. “You don’t see them much anymore,” says Takuma’s husband, Kawachi, who’s been stoking the irori for the previous hour. “But it’s vital in winter — it’s so cold and humid up here.” We eat domestically hunted wild boar and venison with backyard veggies, and the 2 youngsters, Kazuma and Nonoho, are straightforward firm, consuming and laughing at their pet goats bleating for dinner outdoors. Come bedtime, the household withdraw to their annex, leaving me a selection of futon or Western-style beds — with the promise of a kamado oven rice cookery lesson at breakfast. 

So way more than a place to sleep, nohakus (rural homestays or farm stays) have develop into a Kyushu lodging staple over the previous 20 years, providing cultural immersion and the possibility to study cookery, farming, native crafts and (at coastal fishing communities) aquaculture. Near the Sugar Road staging-post city of Ureshino, I keep at homestay Adonoan, the place Hitomi Noda and her photographer husband, Naoyuki, share artwork abilities with guests of their backyard studio. There’s additionally the possibility, when he’s home, to take a pottery class with neighbour Kaneko Mitomu — a ceramist whose superlative examples of Saga area pottery have graced the British Museum. I tour the standard, four-chamber kiln, marvelling at his work, which populates each floor and is even stacked out within the backyard — bowls and pots sitting like sculptures underneath the loquat bushes. Surrounded by rice fields and lit by fireflies as soon as darkness descends, it’s one other liminal satoyama panorama whose magical ambiance stays with me lengthy after I’ve departed. 

To Hell and again

A imaginative and prescient of Hell, fairly actually, greets me in Unzen. The hill city, centred round an energetic volcano in Kyushu’s Shimabara space, is home to the Unzen Jigoku sulphur springs (jigoku interprets as ‘hell’). Steaming fumaroles punctuate the bottom at each flip, an inferno softened by the plush mountains of surrounding Unzen-Amakusa National Park. Founded in 1934, Japan’s first nationwide park was created as Unzen grew right into a summer season retreat from coastal humidity. Today, Unzen Jigoku’s iron-rich waters feed a modest variety of spa accommodations, together with Kai Unzen, the place guest-room balconies have non-public baths overlooking the broiling coronary heart of the springs. Kai’s communal onsen — typically male-female segregated — hosts a number of indoor-outdoor swimming pools, together with some with gray, unfiltered water, which, as soon as the compulsory pre-onsen scrub and bathe is finished, I strategy tentatively. “Don’t stay in too long,” cautions the attendant. “More than 10 minutes can be too harsh on the skin.”

Kyushu is home to Japan’s largest focus of scorching springs — testomony to the very fact onsen bathing remains to be very a lot woven into native tradition. And this one is powerfully scorching stuff. Once in a post-bath stupor, the onsen resort customized of carrying home pyjamas to dinner, taken in non-public cubicles, appears fully wise. My meal of shippoku small plates and a shabu-shabu scorching pot turns into a protracted, lazy indulgence. But the extravagant feast, all artfully offered on Saga ceramics, in the end defeats me. The little castella sponge cake (a Sugar Road dessert of Portuguese origin) I discover later in my room, left as a present, has to attend. 

Another style of the Sugar Road awaits at my closing homestay an hour away in farmland outdoors the town of Minamishimabara. Here, I muck in with the multigenerational Matsuo household on their strawberry farm, studying about seedlings and soil administration, earlier than having a go at making Omura sushi. It takes a number of makes an attempt with the wood software that shapes the pressed rice — grandma guiding my hand with one among hers, the opposite overlaying her mouth to guffaw kind of good-naturedly at my ineptitude. We high it with bits of scrambled egg and neon-pink dried fish roe, and the primary chew is a revelation. The recipe, courting again 500 years, requires the rice to be barely sugared. It’s a winningly sweet-salty-umami mixture that we eat at a household dinner alongside fried fish and a tempura of inexperienced pepper and aubergine, freshly picked from the backyard. 

Rui, the household’s youngest, turns 9 the next day, so after consuming there are fireworks to rejoice within the backyard. We mild sparklers with an often fierce fizz — I squeak in shock, and our grins are illuminated of their lemon sherbet glow. Life is nice.