7. Down to the end of Japan – or it is the start ?

The floating Torii at Miyajima

Japan seems to be full of Torii, different sized ceremonial gates to shrines, sometimes in stone, sometimes in wood.   The wooden ones are always painted vermilion and when not faded they do make a very impressive sight.  The one side trip out from Hiroshima that we made was to Miyajima Island with a ‘floating’ Torii just offshore.  It doesn’t float at all really but sits on the seabed approximately fifty yards offshore.  Always listed as one of the sights to see in Japan, it does look very good as the sun sets.  We decided to go to the top of the island at 530 metres up and on this, the day after our second Typhoon had blown through it was very clear and sunny.  Walking a longer than expected route meant that it took us nearly an hour to get to the cablecar, called ropeways by the Japanese which doesn’t sound anywhere near as safe to me.  After two rides and arrival at the top station we were left with a further forty minute uphill route to the top but the views were stunning across a blue sea dotted with islands and a blue sky dotted with puffy white clouds.

from the top of  Miyajima Island

I think we all associate Japan with bowing and it is ubiquitous.  There are course different types of bow which to my British eye seem to fall into about three or four categories although I’m sure it’s nuanced much more to the Japanese.   The casual catching of people’s eye is just a slightly exaggerated nod just as you might use to a neighbour you recognised but didn’t particularly care to speak to.   Then there’s the ‘having provided a service I must bow to this customer’.  Arms by the side, bend at the waist far enough to see if your shoes need polishing.   Deeper still is getting very deferential which I think is used for an apology.  The full deep bow from the waist is to excuse the worst behaviour, like voting for trump or Brexit.  Here are some examples :

-        -  In a train, the ticket inspector gets to the end of a carriage, turns, takes off his cap and bows to the carriage – sometimes quite formally, replaces the cap.

-         - The women with the refreshment trolley on the train will also turn and bow but not so formally.

-        -  Hotel receptions may have four or five staff who, if not busy with another customer, will all bow as you approach.

-         - If you buy anything anywhere, you get a bow.

-         - One big department store we went into had three women in smart uniforms who pointed you to a lift as it arrived.  As we got in and turned, the doors closed and we were treated to the full deep bow.

I quite like the exaggerated nod but more than that seems 
too subservient to me.  However, I’m

at the top of Miyajima Island

not Japanese.

Going to see the floating Torii was an excursion using our Japan Railcard, also valid for some ferries and subway lines and only available to foreign visitors or to Japanese citizens who can prove they’ve lived out of Japan for ten years.  We had to buy ours before we left home and then go through a ridiculously long process just to get it authorised once we got here.  Doing a quick back of the vape pack calculation, I reckon we covered the cost in the first week of use and we had a 21 day pass.  They’re good to tourists here, as well as being amazingly friendly and helpful.   A variety of tourist sites let us in at half price on production of our passports.    There would be a riot in the UK if it was suggested that foreign visitors got into things at half price when us Brits had to pay full price.

So it was the train again from Hiroshima to almost the southern point of the Japanese mainland, Kagoshima on Kyushu.  I haven’t mentioned the Japanese inordinate fondness for Ferris Wheels and the station at Kagoshima has one on the roof of its eight or ten storey building.   Here in Japan they appear to make the station a huge focal point for a city with multiple floors of shops and restaurants.  Not quite on the scale of Kyoto’s shopping district but it makes the city centres vibrant, lively and hence not run down places to avoid.  They also have the bus station right in front of the train station, not tucked away somewhere else so the different services mesh together well.  All the public transport appears to be very well used here and a trip through a big station at a busy time develops a side-step ability worthy of Phil Bennett.   If you don’t know, search Welsh Rugby Union, the man was a genius on the field.

Mt Kaimon in Satsuma 

The southern end of Kyushu is Satsuma Province and sometime in the 19^th century Britain was at war with Satsuma after some Brits refused to bow to the local Shogun.  I imagine the Brits had been hurt when the Shogun criticised the cut of their suits or something.

Some areas of Kyushu are actively volcanic and just across the bay from Kagoshima is one volcano that regularly belches out ash and smoke across the city, so naturally we took a ferry (courtesy of our JR Pass again) across to get a better look.  Every now and again, black or white clouds would appear making it look as if a conclave was having a particularly difficult time choosing a new Pope.   This peak was the classic volcanic pointy shape and we were to see quite a few more like this in

the ferry from Kagoshima to Sakurajima Island and volcano

Kyushu.  We rented a car for the second time this trip planning to go further south to have a look

Taking the sands

around and to fit in a beach bath in hot volcanic sand.  Yes, really.   Walking past a post- industrial landscape of volcanic steam and multi coloured mess, we got to the changing area, were issued with a robe each and leaving our clothes in a locker, wrapped ourselves up and went down to the beach.  Under a corrugated iron roof was a line of what appeared to be shallow graves with a head sticking out of each.   Your grave is indicated by your personal grave digger and you get covered with hot sand which is hotter still underneath.   They suggest that about fifteen minutes is long enough “in case you suffer from low level burns” as they encouragingly phrase it.  Then it was off to a hot onsen infinity pool looking over the sea with a wooded cliff just on the left to the north and another volcano to the left and south.  Wonderful.   We were both very relaxed and took our time on a scenic ridge drive home to our hotel.

The main rail route through to Kagoshima is inland but nearer to the west than the east coast and we decided we would wander up the east coast by rail and see some more of the less touristy bits.  This was definitely not Shinkansen country, there are single coach trains here which judder along meandering narrow gauge single tracks with rolling stock that looked like old London Transport rejects.   It was to be fair, through some fabulously scenic mountainous country.  On one of these rattlers heading to a connection with a real bullet train, we broke down.  We knew it was a

hearing that the train had broken down !

stopping train but we expected the stops to be at stations.  The driver was on his walkie talkie, announcements were made which we couldn’t understand, some men working on the track came back for a chat.  Heather handed out the Satsumas she’d bought in Satsuma to the other passengers.   It was all so un-Japanese and more like an Ealing comedy from the 1950’s.  It was enormous fun.  A bit Agatha Christie-esque.  Disparate nationalities (us, two German women, 14 Japanese).  Passengers stranded at Little Piddling in-the Paddy Field.  “What you about to hear is a true story.  Only the names have been changed to protect the innocent”  etc…. 

We were already due to transfer to a bus at one station to take us round a section of line that had been damaged in one of the typhoons and now after an hour or so we were to get mini-bus taxis to take us to the station where we were originally due to transfer from the train to the bus.    Got that OK ?    So we finally arrived at the station for our connection five minutes or so late to find that the Shinkansen had been held up for connecting passengers.  Much more Japanese.

So we finally sort-of circumnavigated Kyushu and got to Nagasaki.  Today it’s an attractive town set

Queueing positions, Nagasaki station 

in wooded hills and we liked it more than many towns we’d been to.   So many of the cities here have wonderful, imaginative modern architecture in the centre, then ugly modern stuff from a few years back and mile upon mile of suburb/strip development.   Leaving Kyoto coming west, it was an hour before we cleared the full urban sprawl and got into anything like countryside.  In what we thought to be relatively small Kagoshima, we were staying in the centre and when we drove south it was fifteen kilometres before we left the main built up area.  Many of these places are a bit like those depressing towns you see in the ‘fly-over’ United States states (if you happen to be driving) only a hundred times bigger.

Now, if I write up all the little behaviours that seem so different than home I’d have enough material to write one of these blogs every day so to spare all of us, here are a number of bullet points rather than whole paragraphs.

-         - Staff in some restaurants who all chant something in unison for no apparent reason.

-        -  Public maps are common but north is at the top in a minority of cases, sometimes the top is NE or SW.  In one place we saw two maps of the area within ten yards of each other and each had a different direction at the top.

-         We really did see Purple Sweet Potato Flavour Kit Kats.

-        -  Most hotels have washing machines although in one ‘their’ machines were out of the building and in a laundrette across the road.  At the other extreme in another hotel it was possible to see how far through a wash cycle had got by checking on the room TV screen.

-        -  Nobody wears a waterproof, there are just millions of umbrellas.

-         -  and the best of all is that this is a country that has no tipping.   Early on in the trip we’d had a coffee and cake each and Heather had left something like 8000 Yen for a bill of 7988 Yen and the person on the till came out of the shop and insisted on handing over the 12 Yen change.

school party waiting at a level crossing