Kumamoto

I have no idea and no way of knowing how many people actually read this, other than my family back home, but I’m sure everybody who is is probably expecting more snowy mountains and blizzards.  Recently this blog’s become more of a snowboarding blog than a travel one.  But during the last weekend of February, I went to see something at the other end of the spectrum.  A volcano.

Mount Aso, or 阿蘇山 as it is written in Japanese, is the largest active volcano in Japan.  Its other claim to fame is a huge caldera with a circumference of around 120 kilometers, and at its peak is just shy of 1600 metres above sea level.  I’d heard about it a few days in advance of our trip to Kumamoto, thanks to the immensely helpful Wikitravel, a sister site of Wikipedia – just as dense with information but from a traveller’s perspective.  Thanks to the page on Kumamoto, I knew which train to get, where from and how long it would take.  I left our hotel in Kumamoto for Mount Aso early on Sunday morning, by which time I’d already visited “one of the three most beautiful gardens in Japan”, looked around Kumamoto Castle, and eaten raw horse.

After inviting Lucy and Lee-Anna up to Nagoya last November, they returned the favour.  Thanks to some help begrudgingly given to us by our hospital coordinator Nami Tojo, we booked a return flight from Chubu International Airport to Kumamoto, from the 24th of January to the 28th.  Tojo san is friendly and speaks English well, but sometimes seems a little reluctant to help out.  “Well, you can read chinese characters right?” she asked Rhys back when we were trying to organise our transport to Kyoto last year.  She can be very helpful after a bit of encouragement, though. 

We set off from the apartments early enough to be at the airport around two hours in advance, expecting the usual awkward and lengthy security procedures.  However, partly due to it being a domestic flight, and partly because of the level of safety here, the checks were minimal at most.  We didn’t even need to show our passports or gaijin cards.  The only place we were asked for our passports, to our surprise, was at the hotel in Kumamoto.  The other oddity of our journey was that our combined ticket worth ￥60,000 was a small slip of paper we picked up from a convenience store.  It was a relief to get it changed into something a little more solid, and the staff at the airport were helpful, even with limited airport-staff level English.  At the check in, we were asked if we had what sounded like a ”collection” (read connection) from Kumamoto, causing some brief confusion.  Sometimes, peoples English accent is so strange, or on occasion just because an English word is stuck in the middle of a Japanese sentence, it can take some time to actually realise you’re hearing a word you know and use regularly.

The odd accent used by the stewardess reading out an English version of the in-flight information was one of the few points of interest on an otherwise quick and uneventful flight.  We were soon touching down in Kumamoto, one of the larger cities in the southernmost of Japan’s three main islands, Kyushu.  In Japanese, Kumamoto is written 熊本, which kind of means “bear book” (incidentally, Nagoya or 名古屋 is something like “name of old house”).   It may be much easier to see where place names may have derived from with the kanji to help, but it’s no less meaningless than in English.  Kumamoto is more modern and livelier than Kyoto, but it’s still a far cry from the hustle and bustle of our home away from home, Nagoya.  An old fashioned tram line connects the different parts of the city rather than the subway which crisscrosses Nagoya, and the main shopping and nightlife area distinctly resembles a slightly more upmarket version of the arcade in Osu, Nagoya, with a small series of partially sheltered streets packed with markets and stalls.  One of the advantages of the tram line was that it was pretty impossible to get lost around central Kumamoto.  After our practice wandering the streets in Kyoto, we found it pretty easy to follow it through to the shopping district.

Like Rhys and I, Lee-Anna and Lucy are also working at a Red Cross hospital, theirs however is in a much quieter area, and without a convenient subway line they usually either go to the centre via bus or bicycle.     We made our way to the traffic centre on Thursday afternoon and caught one of the few buses going all the way out to the hospital.  When we eventually got there, Lee-Anna came to meet us and gave us a brief tour.  Their hospital seemed a fair bit smaller than ours, after all Kumamoto is a much smaller city, though this had the upshot of her seeming to know everybody who worked in the hospital.  Unlike Yagoto Nisseki hospital, the Kumamoto Red Cross only takes volunteers for half of the year, so maybe it’s more of a special event for them.

After looking around Lee-Anna’s workplace, she introduced us to the director of their hospital.  The director, or ‘bucho’, of our hospital is friendly when he sees us, but seems to keep his distance.  On the other hand, Lee-Anna and Lucy went out with their bucho on a weekly basis after starting at the hospital for at least a couple of months.  Soon after meeting us, he suggested going for sushi.  The place we ended up going to was close, so we could walk there.  Thanks to the Bucho’s bottomless wallet – after his hospital performing poorly in the Japan Red Cross sports competition a couple of years ago, he got the hospital a shedload of exercise equipment to make sure they won the next time – we got to sample almost every kind of sushi and sashimi.  The sushi chefs found it hilarious that we were speaking in Nagoya slang, and we found out Kumamoto slang has a lot of similarities.  As with Nagoya’s dialect, most of it only involves a change in sound at the end of a word, compared to that from Tohoku, northern Japan, which can sound like a different language.

Following several plates of standard sashimi, and several glasses of sake, the bucho asked us if we wanted to try the food that Kumamoto is famous for.  Basashi is raw horse meat, or horse sashimi.  It doesn’t look much different from any other kind of sashimi, and actually tastes pretty good.  And I didn’t get tapeworm, so everything was fine.  Worryingly however, walking around Kumamoto later I saw a sign for something looking suspiciously like chicken sashimi.  My curiosity ends there though.

After a couple of hours, the bucho had to leave to go to either his family or a hostess bar, so paid the frighteningly large bill and said farewell.  We headed back to the hotel room to get some sleep, before doing some sightseeing around Kumamoto on Friday.  Although we’d mainly made the trip to see Lee-Anna and Lucy, they were working on Friday, and there are a handful of things in Kumamoto we heard were well worth seeing.  It was cloudy at Aso san, so we put that off for another day, instead deciding to walk around the city.

Kumamoto Castle isn’t all that different from Nagoya’s, but due to Kumamoto’s proximity to Korea, many of the tourists wandering the castle grounds were actually Koreans.  So many Korean tourists visit Kumamoto, that many signs are written not only in Japanese and English, but also in Hangul, the Korean alphabet.  Although the castle was not damaged in WW2, it was besieged in the late nineteenth century during something called the Satsuma Rebellion (nothing to do with small oranges) and is still undergoing some reconstruction today.  This meant that one of the first parts of the castle to come into view was actually some scaffolding.  Despite this, it still showed some beautiful architecture and from the top there was a clear view over Kumamoto.

Inside the castle, there were walls upon walls of small wooden plaques with peoples names written on in calligraphy.  After throwing around a few ideas about what they signified, maybe something dramatic like people who had died whilst defending the castle, or people who had been born there in the past, it turned out that you could get your own name put up there by donating about fifty pounds worth of yen to the castle reconstruction fund.  Even though the main building was under construction, you could still climp up to near the top.

After wandering around the castle for a while, we caught the tram going to Suizenji Koen, a famous Japanese garden.  Despite having a reputation as one of the most beautiful in Japan, the park was eerily quiet, the only life visible being the few birds resting on stones around the lake, and the army of people tending to the carefully trimmed hedges and trees.  Despite hardly anybody visiting, the stalls were all being manned, if from a distance.  As we walked past one of them, an old lady ran out of the building behind to get us to buy some weird rice-sticks.  Looked like french bread but was a lot less tasty.  The park was scenic, but the stillness detracted from the atmosphere more than it added to it.  The place felt completely artificial and crafted – which is exactly what it was.  Having been a little let down by the park, we decided to walk around one of the other recommended sights of Kumamoto, Lake Ezu.  There were several bright maps dotted around the paths crossing over and around the lake, but the place itself was depressingly dreary.  It was a little livelier than the park, with some people walking their dogs, but otherwise the murky water and cloudy skies made it feel more like a swamp than a lake.  The only colourful things in the area were some out of use paddle boats with cheap looking disney designs painted on.

After seeing the best of what Kumamoto city had to offer, I went to go find some food on my own before going out to meet Lee-Anna and Lucy in the evening.  I just picked a random yakisoba restaurant inside the large shopping arcade, and as soon as I walked in both the other customers and the people working behind the bar seemed quite surprised to see a foreigner come in, and I was soon fielding questions like “where have you come from?”.  Japan is homogenous to the extreme.  Ninety nine percent of the population is Japanese.  This is much more pronounced in Kyushu than it is in the large cities of central Honshu, like Tokyo and Osaka.  Whilst we sometimes notice a few stares during working at the hospital, it’s nothing compared to the attention we receieved in Kumamoto.  Walking to a purikura place on our last evening in the city, a woman walking ahead of us must have been able to hear us speaking English and turned around to look at us every few seconds, seemingly doubting our existence.

After eating my yakisoba, which is basically fried noodles with some meat, Rhys and I went to meet the girls in town.  One of the nice things about Kumamoto is that the shopping area seems very centralised, lots of the bars are packed closely together so it’s easy to move around.  Wherever we went, people recognised Lucy and Lee-Anna.  They ran into their yoga instructor whilst going into a random shop, and when we went for dinner at the end of the weekend, the waitress remembered Lee-Anna from when she last came, and what she was doing in Kumamoto.  That was just one time, way back in September.  It certainly seems like things move a little slower over there, and the community is close knit.  Nice as it is I prefer the bigger city.  Among the bars we visited over the weekend, the nicest was a place called Shark Attack.  The floor was covered in sand and the bartender could speak English pretty well.  Despite what I just said about there seeming to be less foreigners here, or maybe due to it, the gaijin community is also very close.  For Lee-Anna’s birthday, we went to a place called Jeff’s World Bar.  Lee-Anna’s friend Mercedes was visiting at the same time as us, and like she said to me “it was like stepping back into a bar in Canada”.  I could have counted all the Japanese people there on one hand, but it was still packed.

Whilst we were staying in Kumamoto, I checked at the reception daily to see how the weather was holding up at Aso san.  Everyday, the woman behind the desk reported to me that it was cloudy, but I still had to get up early every morning to find out if it was worth going.  However, Sunday was our last full day in Kumamoto, which meant it was either then or never.  I heard it was cloudy, but got up anyway, had my complementary breakfast; thankfully provided by the hotel but unfortunately at a nearby burger joint, and went to the train station.  One slightly expensive train ticket and two and a bit hours later, I was standing outside Aso train station.  There was nothing to see.  As I mentioned earlier, Aso’s caldera is some 120 kilometers in circumference.  The train station is actually in the caldera, but being inside it doesn’t offer much of a view.  The main sight at Aso is the crater of Mount Naka, a restless giant which spews out foul smelling sulphur gases.  Due to these gases, I was told at the information centre by the train station that today, I would not be able to visit the top of Mt. Naka by foot.  A cable car carries people up to the summit on clear days, but apparently the risk was too great from time to time.  Regardless, I wasn’t about to turn back now.  I got on a bus by the station which seemed to have already travelled a long way.  On the top of buses in Kumamoto, there is a display for the fare which varies depending on which stop you board.  When I got on at Aso station, the highest fare was over 3000 yen.  It was pretty fancy and had a guide, so I guess it was a tour bus.

I took it as far as it went to Mt. Naka, and as soon as I got off, I could understand why the cable car wasn’t going anywhere.  The stench of sulphur – if you’ve studied chemistry anytime recently you’ll know it’s like rotten eggs - was so overcoming that around the car park at the cable car base, there wasn’t a single person not coughing due to inhaling the fumes.  After admiring the view I decided to walk back along a path away from the volcano, and noticed I was even wheezing a bit from the gas.  Good job the top was closed off, after all.  On the way back, I saw the helicopter.  I’d read previously on wikitravel that there was a helicopter on the mountain taking tourists up for a very special view of Mount Naka’s crater.  Other than the fumes being coughed up from the mountain, the day was otherwise perfect and clear.  It may have been foul weather in Kumamoto, but two hours away at Aso there was barely a cloud in the sky.  I knew as soon as I saw the helicopter, waiting alone in the barren wasteland around the crater, that I’d be going for a ride.

I had to wait at the bottom for a while, as it wasn’t very economical to send one person up on their own.  I didn’t mind waiting at the bottom, as the people operating the service were friendly, and gave me a nice ego-boost by complimenting me on my Japanese.  Eventually, a Mongolian couple came along and agreed to go up with me.  The woman seemed to be fluent not just in Mongolian, but also Japanese and English, so translated everything the pilot had to say.  Getting in the helicopter, which was a first time experience for me, first we each were given a bulky headpiece to put on.  It totally cancelled out the outside sound which itself felt quite strange.  Even stranger was hearing my own voice through the headphones when I spoke.  Nevertheless, soon we were airborne, and in for an expensive but incredible four minute ride.

The view from the top was without equal, you could even see the curvature of the earth, looking past the crater, many miles into the distance.  Aside from that, through the poisonous clouds sulphur the bubbling water inside was visible, itself an alien green.  I can’t remember what the pilot was talking about as we made our revolution about the crater, the view was so encapsulating.  As they say, a picture can say more than a thousand words.