My other trip to Japan this year on account of work, and specifically for an educational and learning conference in Tokuyama. And since I also had quite a bit more annual leave to clear for the year, I worked out an extended version of the itinerary where I’d fly in two days earlier, and likewise hang around the area for an additional four days after the conference too. Compared to our family trip to Kanagawa and Hokkaido, planning for this 11 day trip was a cinch. I didn’t need to find family-suitable accommodations, and likewise could plan with no constraints apart from level of physical fitness to how much I’d like to explore in a city a day.
There are still a number of specific itinerary bits that I need to work out each day – especially distances between places, and whether I’m seriously going to try to clock in 14,000 steps each day of travel haha – the movement from city to city and its sequence is pretty much finalized, with accommodations reserved in each city.
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Kyushu is a huge island, with some of the most fascinating bits in the far south of the island. The conference however ends in Hiroshima for me, and since the Peace Memorial Park in the city is a must-visit, alongside the well-regarded gardens of Okayama meant I’d stay in the city for two days more after the conference.
I was going to be leaving the country from Fukuoka, so had just two more days to do trips back and forth from the city. I’d been to Kumamoto already, and visited Kumamoto Castle, Suizenji Gardens and also the Kyu-Hosokawa Gyobutei mansion during that trip then. The castle suffered extensive damage from an earthquake a few years back and is, apparently, still closed – so it didn’t make sense for me to visit the city again just yet.
I was quite tempted to do Kagoshima and Miyazaki to the far south, but gave up on that one could easily spend more than a day trip in either place. Closer to Fukuoka is Nagasaki, location of another memorial park on account of the other nuclear bomb the Yanks dropped on them 74 years ago, alongside a night view of the city widely reputed to be among the top three in Japan. Yanagawa is also very near to Fukuoka, with easy day trips from the latter.
A mental math notes that I’d be spending almost a month in Japan this year across both trips now: 11 days in September, and another 15 in December. So, more notes to come on both trips in the weeks ahead, alongside also posts on a new robot cleaner, and also the Sony FE 28mm f2.0 lens!
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