Into Kyushu’s Mist, on a Budget

NAGASAKI, Japan —  “We are now traveling at 285 km/hour.” I reached for the calculator when I saw that startling announcement spooling by on the display in our train. Japan, I determined, was racing past us at 176.7 mph. The historic island of Kyushu whizzed by like a fast-forward video about rice farms and train stations.

My husband, Kevin, and I lived in Osaka from 1997 to 2000, but our work schedules at a university left precious little time to explore the country. So last October, armed with rail passes and hostel information, we returned for a budget vacation to Kyushu, the southernmost of Japan’s four main islands. Kyushu is also the most exotic, a fiery landscape of volcanoes, steam jets, hot springs and boiling mud pools--a complete and welcome contrast to Osaka’s urban sprawl.

“Japan on a budget” may sound like a contradiction in terms, but it’s quite possible. The country is notorious for high prices; a tiny, stuffy room in a lower-end hotel can run $125 or more.

But we found that careful planning made travel affordable. The Japan Rail Pass, an extensive network of all-ages hostels and family-run inns, and tourist information offices with English-speaking staff all helped. Our prior knowledge of the country may have made things easier, but it wasn’t necessary.

We arrived in Nagasaki, a city of about 450,000 near the island’s western tip, as a tropical storm threatened one evening. The city is less than five hours away by train from Osaka, where we had spent time with old friends, but it felt like a different country. We dropped our bags at the hostel and set out to explore.

As the two places where the U.S. dropped the atomic bomb, Nagasaki and Hiroshima (on the neighboring island of Honshu) resonate with World War II history. But as we soon learned, Nagasaki’s story dates back much further.

On a tip from the tourist office, we walked up to Glover Garden at sunset and watched the lights come on below us. Nagasaki climbs the green mountainsides along a narrow ocean inlet. When the city was reopened to European traders in 1859, they grabbed scenic locations for their homes, and Scotsman Thomas Glover got one of the best, a slope high above the harbor. His graceful tile-roofed bungalow forms the centerpiece of a historical park preserving a romantic era in Nagasaki history.

Some believe that Glover’s marriage to a local geisha inspired “Madama Butterfly,” the tragic Puccini opera of love and loss, though the marriage was long and apparently happy. Others believe that Glover’s house was merely used as the setting for the story.

These Europeans were only the latest in a long succession of foreign settlers. For centuries, Kyushu was Japan’s window on the world. From earliest history the Chinese traded here, and in the mid-1500s Portuguese missionaries landed on the island, establishing Nagasaki as an international port.

The shogun expelled most foreigners in 1637, so Chinese and Dutch traders allowed to stay in Nagasaki were Japan’s only contact with the outside world for more than 200 years. That left Nagasaki with an international flavor that exists nowhere else in Japan.

By morning the rain started. The massive red archway of Sofuku-ji, a 17th century Chinese Zen temple, glowed in the rain. Even more flamboyant was its inner gate, with tiers of ornate wooden bracketing painted a dozen brilliant colors. Built in Ningbo, China, it was transported to Nagasaki and reassembled. A 6-foot-tall iron caldron in the courtyard shows the temple’s central role in the Chinese community. During a famine, monks cooked rice here to feed 3,000 people. Only in Nagasaki was Japan’s close relationship with China maintained, and the city still has an extensive Chinatown.

Of course, the most famous date in Nagasaki’s history is Aug. 9, 1945. At 11:02 a.m., a nuclear bomb detonated over the suburb of Urakami, killing or injuring nearly two-thirds of Nagasaki’s 240,000 residents, according to some estimates. Of all the heart-rending exhibits we saw in the Nagasaki Atomic Bomb Museum, two miles north of downtown, what devastated me most was a simple display of clay roof tiles that can be touched, their surface blistered.

Outside the museum, the Peace Park abounds with uplifting sculptures donated by different nations, and everywhere are strings of 1,000 brightly colored origami cranes, a Japanese symbol of hope. But the enormous Peace Statue of a man pointing skyward toward the threat of another bomb was foreboding. At nightfall, as we walked the 19th century flagstone lanes of Dutch Slopes, a hillside of Victorian-era European houses, I marveled again at how much the city has preserved its past despite the atomic blast.

The city’s cosmopolitan roots also can be seen in its cuisine. Portuguese influence is apparent in that quintessentially Japanese dish, tempura, and bakeries still turn out a Portuguese cake called kasutera, or castella. Nagasaki is more noted for Chinese-inspired dishes, though. We stopped at a restaurant in Chinatown to sample champon (sometimes called chanpon), a tasty mixture of thick noodles with bits of pork, egg and seafood in broth.

If Nagasaki is best described as an international city, Kumamoto can be called pure Japanese. Our express train there, called the Komame, was another Japanese marvel: black leather seats, parquet floors and a vestibule in each car decorated with panels of calligraphy in “ordinary” class. (“First class” and “second class” strike the Japanese as unnecessarily blunt; “green car” and “ordinary class” are the terms.)

Kumamoto, a city of 630,000 about 150 miles by rail from Nagasaki, was the seat of a powerful feudal lord who ruled from a hilltop fortress. Though the tower of Kumamoto Castle is a modern reconstruction, the original stone ramparts still stand, more than three miles long and 30 feet high. They were built in 1601 without mortar and were said to be so perfectly constructed that even a mouse couldn’t find a toehold.

Across town, Suizenji Park hints at the wealth of the city’s feudal rulers, the Hosokawa family. The park originally was the private garden of the Hosokawas’ villa, where the lord could stroll through miniature landscapes reproducing 53 scenic spots in Japan. We walked in his footsteps, past exquisite dwarf trees, tiny lakes and an instantly recognizable, 10-foot-tall Mt. Fuji made of earth and grass.

Urban Japan ends at Kumamoto, so no more speeding express trains. Our cross-island local was a three-car diesel that chugged and clanked across the wildest, greenest countryside we had seen in Japan. Unbroken forest covered the mountainsides, while in the valleys, bright pink spider amaryllis bloomed at the fringes of ripening yellow rice fields.

We were headed for Aso National Park, Kyushu’s fiery heart. It’s a bit of a misnomer, since nowadays the mountain is actually a valley, a crater 50 miles around, formed when Mt. Aso exploded 100,000 years ago. At the center of the valley, five volcanoes later formed, one still active. A plume of white smoke pours from the crater of Mt. Nakadake, and its eruptions are so unpredictable that emergency shelters have been built on the rim for sightseers.

Our plan was to climb one of the mountains the next morning, so we stopped for the night at the Aso Youth Hostel, about $20 per person. The hostel’s energetic housemother, Mrs. Shiotani, takes her responsibilities seriously. Stuffing all the guests into her car, she drove us down to the local supermarket, where leftover sushi and sandwiches are marked down at 6 p.m., then browbeat an employee into slapping half-price stickers on everything in sight. I feasted on my dinner of cut-rate inari sushi in the hostel’s homey TV lounge.

Equipped with an English trail map, courtesy of the hostel, we set out for the volcanoes the next morning. A path not far from the hostel climbed through wind-swept pastures and lonely meadows, a Japan I had never suspected.

From the peak of Mt. Kijimadake, we hiked down to a broad, breezy meadow called Kusasenri, “a thousand miles of grass.” Across from it, a tourist complex sprawls behind a parking lot with slots for 50 buses. Teenagers crowded around a stable of shaggy brown horses, and I was surprised to discover they were paying $11 for a five-minute horseback ride. A grassy field is apparently as much of a novelty as a volcano.

It was a long walk up and a longer walk down, leaving us stiff and achy on the train that evening. We were ready for our final stop: the hot-spring resort of Beppu.

All of Kyushu is geologically active, but in Beppu, nature pulls out all the stops. It looks like any touristy Japanese town until you notice the steam rising everywhere--from manhole covers in alleys, vents behind grocery stores, pipes in residents’ flower beds. Japanese travelers flock to relax at scores of hot-spring spas called onsen, as well as scenic pools called jigoku (the word means “hells”) that are too torrid for bathing.

Even our budget inn, Minshuku Kokage, featured a mineral bath on the ground floor, and we took a soothing soak that night. But for the full experience, we headed the next day to Hyotan Onsen, one of Beppu’s fanciest spas.

How many ways can you cook yourself? I sampled the hot bath, the extra-hot bath, the not-quite-so-hot bath. I tried the waterfall bath (hot water pouring down from a bamboo pipe to pummel aching body parts), the pebble bath (frigid water with rounded stones to walk on), the steam bath (so hot I was blinded by sweat). I even tried the sand bath. Wrapped in a thin cotton robe, I stretched out under a foot of clean, hot volcanic sand, the classic pose of dads at the beach.

Best of all was the open-air bath. It was a quiet morning, and I had it all to myself: the steaming pool of still water, the artfully placed boulders where dragonflies sunned themselves, the deep blue sky, the lacy red maple leaves rustling above the woven bamboo wall. It’s a testimony to my strength of character that I’m not still sitting there.

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Guidebook: Japan on the Cheap

Getting there: The best way to fly from L.A. to Nagasaki involves at least one change of planes. Varig flies to Nagoya, where Japan Air System (JAS) or All Nippon (ANA) connects to Nagasaki. Varig also flies to Tokyo, where JAS connects to Nagasaki. Restricted round-trip fares begin at $1,252.

United flies from LAX to San Francisco to Osaka, connecting on Air Nippon to Nagasaki. Air Canada flies from L.A. to Vancouver, British Columbia, to Osaka, connecting on Air Nippon to Nagasaki. Restricted round-trip fares begin at $1,020.

Telephones: To call the numbers below from the U.S., dial 011 (the international dialing code), 81 (country code for Japan) and the local number.

Getting around: The Japan Rail Pass is an excellent deal. Seven-day adult pass for travel nationwide costs about $215; seven-day pass valid for Kyushu only is about $152. (By comparison, an hourlong trip by bullet train can cost more than $60.) Before leaving home, travelers should buy a voucher, which can be exchanged for a rail pass upon arrival in Japan. Several travel companies, including JTB (www.jtb.co.jp/eng) and Kintetsu (www.kintetsu.com), sell vouchers in the U.S.; details also available from the Japan National Tourist Organization (contact information below).

Where to stay: During our budget trip we stayed at youth hostels, which are open to travelers of all ages. Nagasaki Youth Hostel was clean and comfortable though otherwise unremarkable. Dormitory-style accommodations are about $22 per person, per night. 1-1-16 Tateyama, Nagasaki 850-0007; 95-823-5032, fax 95-823-4321, www2.ocn.ne.jp/~nyh/.

Aso Youth Hostel offers dormitory accommodation (and kind management) for about $20 per person, per night. 922-2 Bochu, Aso-cho 869-2225; 967-34- 0804.

In Beppu we stayed at a budget inn called Minshuku Kokage, where a double room is about $59 per night. 8-9 Ekimae-cho, Beppu, Oita-ken 874-0935; 977-23-1753, fax 977-23-3895.

Welcome Inns is a network of budget hotels, inns and pensions that can be reserved through the Japan National Tourist Organization (see below).

Where to eat: On the main street of Nagasaki’s Chinatown, Chuka-en serves chanpon (noodles) for $6.50. Look for the sign that says “since 1946.”

In Kumamoto, across from Lafcadio Hearn House, Tsuruya Department Store’s top floor is lined with small restaurants where you can view plastic replicas of meals before ordering. Expect to pay $7-$10.

In Beppu, two blocks down the main street from the train station, Yayoi Restaurant in the Yayoi Shopping Arcade serves dishes from around Asia for about $6.

Where to relax: Hot springs abound in Beppu. Volunteers at Foreign Tourist Information Office (in the train station shopping area) give out English maps and information on dozens of spas. Hyotan Onsen is open 8 a.m.- 9 p.m. daily; signs and leaflets in English. Admission, $6.

For more information: Japan National Tourist Organization, 515 S. Figueroa St., Suite 1470, Los Angeles, CA 90071; (213) 623-1952, www.jnto.go.jp or www.japantravelinfo.com.

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Kristin Johannsen is a freelance writer in Berea, Ky.