Winter break in Kyushu

Over the winter holiday, I toured the southern Island of Kyushu with good friends from home, Richard & Yoko, and Minhao & Rumi. The southern prefecture of Kyushu is Kagoshima, which contains an island called Sakura-jima, an active volcano that usually erupts with a regularity of about once a day, spewing out flames and ash, the latter of which litters the island with ash. During my visit, the volcanism was unusually active, with eruptions on the order of once each hour, on of which I even caught in a photo.

Oddly, I was told that the region's delicious sweet potatoes (Satsuma-imo, or kara-imo) are due to the nutrient-poor volcanic soil that dominates the region. For some odd reason, these sweet potatoes grow well in nutrient-poor soil.


Richard, Yoko, and I visited the Miyazaki shoreline, once a prosperious vacation site for newlyweds, but now struggling with economic depression as Japan's newlyweds all opt instead for trips overseas to Hawaii and Europe. The abandoned hotels lining the shoreline were sad to see, but the nature of the coast was still impressive. The photo above is a place called Devil's washboard, where the volcanic shoreline is eroded by waves such that the rocks form spines parallel to the coast. Below is the Miyazaki coast as seen from atop a bluff.


We visited a historical village in Miyazaki as well, with thatched-roof homes showing what life was like during feudal times. Amazingly, the cultural treasures that these structures are stocked with are open for the public to come in an explore all the time; in the US, these places would be looted in their first five minutes open, with no security measures taken to prevent such.


Here Yoko poses next to an excavated Haniwa, or ceremonial burial figurine from the Kohun period (5th-8th centuries AD).


After visiting Richard & Yoko, I took a bus to northern Kyushu to visit Minhao and Rumi, shown here playing cards on their kotatsu, or heated table. In the wintertime, families gather around these tables, which have a heater underneath and a blanket around the edges.


We drove to Mt. Aso, a volcano in northern Kyushu, with one of the world's largest calderas. The caldera is dotted with towns, farms, roads, and railways now, but volcanism remains active on one of the peaks in the middle of the caldera. The photo above is from the southern edge of the caldera, looking over the caldera to the peaks in the middle. The caldera then continues opposite the peaks to the north rim, about 10 or 15 miles away.