Kagoshima Hidden Gems

Kagoshima lives with an active volcano across the water from its main street. Sakurajima erupts in small quantities most weeks, ash falls on the city often enough that residents carry designated bags for it and the forecast includes wind direction for it, and the ferry runs 24 hours a day to an island that was joined to the mainland by the 1914 eruption. The Satsuma domain that ruled here was distant enough from Edo to trade semi-independently with the Ryukyus and, later, to import Western industry ahead of everyone else — Sengan-en has a reverberatory furnace in its garden. Satsuma also supplied, with Choshu, most of the leadership that overthrew the shogunate. Offshore, Yakushima rises to nearly 2,000 metres within a small island, which gives it rainfall measured in metres and cedar trees that are thousands of years old in a forest that is wet, mossy and steep enough that the main trail follows an abandoned logging railway for the first two hours.