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Kumamoto city - the largest city and effectively the capital of the prefecture of the same name ('Kumamoto-ken') - has a population of just less than 700,000. The prefecture, home to about 1.8m people, is one of 7 on Kyushu, the last big island of Japan before you reach Okinawa, the string of small islands that stretches south towards Taiwan. We live in Mashiki, a small town east of the city centre, which is where you'll also find the airport. (If you look very hard and know what you're looking for. It's definitely more Inverness International than Heathrow...) Mashiki is ideally placed about 40 minutes by bus (and tram! More of which later) from the city centre to the west, but also a short drive from the mountains to the... well, any other direction, basically. This is farming country here, and the valley is mainly full of rice fields. Even the foothills are too, where the fields are terraced in order to use as much available space as possible. But the inescapable fact is that the Kumamoto area is a plain trapped between encircling mountains in every direction. This means that the hot, humid air has nowhere to go, and gives rise to Kumamoto's infamous summer. When people first arrived in Kumamoto and decided to settle, I can only think that it must have been the middle of winter, because the summer, without air conditioning, would've killed the earliest settlers, I'm sure. But stay they did. And while the locals spend the springtime by delighting in telling new arrivals to the city that they'll never be able to cope with the summer, most newbies manage to get through it without whingeing as much as the locals do. ;) Getting around Kumamoto is a piece of cake. You can drive into the city and there's loads of parking, some high-rise, some subterranean. (Though one underground carpark we've used was built to the design of some perverted underground maze. Luckily, we had a packed lunch.) You can even then go and have a few drinks and the blokes from the car park will drive you and your car home for little more than the taxi fare. There are loads of buses, though you need to be able read kanji (Chinese characters) to be able to use them. Fortunately the ones that go past our house all go to Kiyama, which is represented in fairly simple kanji (ki = tree, yama = mountain). And trams. I was telling Mrs C the other night how I've been in a few cities that have trams and have nearly died under their steel wheels in every one of them - most notably in Manchester and Frankfurt where I simply stepped out in front of an oncoming (but stealthily quiet) tram. And I was telling her how Kumamoto was the only city that had so far not tried to kill me by tram. And promptly stepped out in front of a tram. So now my record is complete. Well done me. Anyway, the trams rrrrocket up and down Densha-doori ("Tram Street") which runs all the way from Kengun (a suburb between us and the city), into the city centre, up to the shadow of the castle, and onwards to the station. The very centre of the city appears to be where 2 covered arcades meet at Densha-doori. These are Kamitori ("Upper Street" which runs north of the street) and Shimotori("Lower Street" which runs south). But the city is perhaps most famous for the castle ("Kumamoto-jo"), billed as "One of the 3 most famous castles in Japan". Oh yes. Mind you, how you measure the 'fame' of a castle, I'm not entirely sure, but it's certainly a beauty. At the moment, it's undergoing a restoration. It's already been burned to the ground once, and this time, they're rebuilding a whole section that wasn't rebuilt at the last rebuild. Do you see? The project's costing bajillions of Yen, which I gather is coming entirely from donations. One wealthy old couple donated what amounted to about half a million pounds. It's due to take until 2007, but you know what builders are like... |
