鹿児島・屋久島
Kagoshima & Yakushima
March 2018
Tokyo has recently joined the other cities of the world in self-imposed isolation as the Cold of the Century sweeps its way across humanity. While nobody alive today will ever be able to forget this event, it won’t be with the same “where were you?” immediacy of the Kennedy assassination or the September 11th attacks. Because the answer to that question, of course, would simply be “stuck at home, like everybody else.”
Rather, the question we’ll ask each other of the coronavirus pandemic of 2020 will be “so what the heck were you up to that whole time?” To which I will answer: cleaning my apartment, playing too much MarioKart, and finally getting around to updating my picture blog.
It’s my pleasure to present, two entire years after the fact, the conclusion to the 4-part visual journal of my March 2018 trip around the southern Japanese island of Kyushu.
When we last left off, I had just done nothing but bathe for several days in the remote onsen towns of Unzen and Kurokawa. After fighting off a brief cold in my layover city of Kumamoto, of which I saw very little, I kept on schedule and caught a train all the way down to Kagoshima, the beautiful costal city on the southernmost tip of Kyushu.
I spent my first several hours lazing around the marina area, which features a wide park with a shopping center, gorgeous views of the ocean liners coming and going, and an inner canal where I was lucky enough to snap a few pics of a dolphin show in progress.
Later that afternoon, one of my hostel’s recommended hikes took me up a nearby mountain at sunset, which offered a panoramic view of the Kagoshima city center as well as Sakurajima, the large active volcano which sits—some might say looms—just across the bay.
Sakurajima happened to be erupting while I was there. Just a little bit. For the Kagoshima locals, it was business as usual.
The following morning, I hopped on a 2.5-hour hydrofoil ferry ride that brought me to the shores of what would immediately become one of my most favorite places on this green earth, the island of Yakushima.
My nickname for Yakushima is “Adventure Island,” which may sound a little juvenile, but perfectly describes the boyhood thirst for adventure that this landscape evokes. If there’s an outdoor activity you love, chances are Yakushima has it, and in a setting as gorgeous and unspoiled as they come on this planet. The entire island was designated as a UNESCO World Heritage Site in 1993. Heck, the picture above was just the view from my hotel room.
The outdoor sport I live for is kayaking, and it was just my luck that there was a kayak rental dock right below my hotel. It was also just my luck that two different school groups had reserved every single kayak for both days I was there. It’s fine, really. It doesn’t look like those kids were having any fun, anyway.
One activity I made sure to do was the hike to the Jōmon Sugi, a giant ancient cedar which lies at the heart of Yakushima’s primeval forest. It’s named after Japanese prehistory, the Jōmon period, and is truly that old, with age estimates starting at 2,170 years on the low end to well over 7,000. It reaches over 25 meters in the air with a trunk 16 and a half meters in circumference. It’s a sort of pilgrimage destination, a living connection to the very beginnings of Japan. It’s also an 8-hour round-trip hike that requires a 4:00am wake-up call, so those that know me well can tell that this is some serious business.
The first half of the hike to the tree was along a well-maintained wooden walkway, curving a path along the mountain slopes while never challenging with more than a gentle incline. The walkway ended at a small rest area, where a sign warned of the rugged terrain ahead. I ate the box lunch my hotel had prepared for me that morning, cursed myself for lugging along an extra 3 kilos of camera gear, and headed onward.
Every step moved me deeper and deeper into the dense primeval forest. Tangled roots curled in and out of the dense earth. Trees grew up out of the fallen trunks of older trees, themselves grown out fallen trees older still. Green and blue moss covered the trees and rocks, dampening the ambient sounds, casting a still silence all around. Director Hayao Miyazaki famously took inspiration from the forests of Yakushima for Princess Mononoke, and if there’s any place in the world where you can feel the spirits around you, it’s within these woods.
At long last, in the middle of the endless forest stands the Jōmon Sugi. It’s tough to truly appreciate the scale of this massive tree in just the photo below, but even a quick look at its thick and gnarled wood is enough to testify that this is a being remnant of an ancient age.
Having paid my respects to this ancient wonder, I began the 4-hour trek back out of the forest, snapping a few more photos on the way, having since forgiven myself for bringing along my unnecessarily heavy camera.
I don’t remember much else from that day, which leads me to believe that I went out to eat, had a cold beer, a warm bath, and a very, very deep sleep.
I kept things a little more domestic for my second full day on the island. I woke up late, had my hopes dashed again by school kids taking up all the kayaks, and visited a bright little cafe for lunch. I walked up to a small shrine perched on a hill above town, and I stayed there for a while to watch the clouds roll in over the mountains. I hiked along the coast for an hour or two, no particular destination in mind, climbing through rocky cliffs to find some hidden tide pools. I felt like I had the entire island to myself.
Before I knew it, it was time for dinner, an early night to bed, and a very early ferry ride back to Kagoshima to catch the train all the way up the East coast of Kyushu to the onsen city of Beppu. For reasons I can no longer remember, I have no pictures from my final two nights there before returning to Tokyo. Which is all the best, as they were mostly spent soaking my tired body in the hot springs (and taking the famous “sand bath,” in which a little old lady buried me up to my neck in hot sand for a seemingly eternal 15 minutes… a story for another time).
In lieu of Beppu pics, below are two more of Yakushima to close this series out.
Two full years have passed since I traveled to Kyushu. I often think of its warm and friendly people, its many unique urban landscapes, its palpable sense of deep history, its beautiful forests and coasts, and its hidden hot spring destinations tucked away within its mountains. I was considering a brief to return to Yakushima this April during the Golden Week holidays in a bid to finally get my chance on one of those kayaks, but recent world events have made those plans much less likely. Which is a shame, because dark and uncertain times like these are exactly when we need to remember that beautiful places still exist in the world, and will be waiting for us on the other side.
