Guided by voices
the journal of Michael Werneburg
twenty-seven years and one million words
Today we left the family home in Nichinan and struck out for Kagoshima. Guided by the voices coming from Oto-san's GPS, we found our way to the mountain island of Sakurajima. This is the most active volcano in the Japanese islands and is, I realized, only the second active volcano that I've actually ever visited. I've seen an active volcano from a distance in Mexico, climbed dormant volcanos in Canada and Fiji, and even driven up one in Hawaii, but this was different.
The stench of sulfur and the yellow-stained rocks were the first give-away. Then there were the stretches of ruinous terrain in which no tall trees existed; clearly this was a place where the Earth's guts periodically spew forth. The road that gamely tries to circle the "island" (it was attached to the mainland 100 years ago in the second-most-recent major eruption) winds and doubles back like a snake with a multiply-broken back. Towering above it all are the enormous jagged cones of naked colourless rock. There are two of them, one a quiescent circle that in the photos is half-filled with ash-mud deposits. The second is a cracked ruin, blasted by the recent eruptions even as it's built up. Venting from that uneven gouge in the mountain is a continuous column of steam, like a grounded Cu-Nim.
The whole thing gives off every appearance of being ready to get into it without notice.
Naturally, the area is populated. A few short kilometres across the bay is the large city of Kagoshima. I don't really understand what drives people (and the city looks to be about half a million) to live literally in the shadow of a steaming volcano, but by 16:00 that's where we found ourselves dragging through the traffic on the GPS's chosen route.
But closer to the action, as it were, are a number of smaller settlements directly adjacent to and even on the shores of the cone. We didn't stop in any of the small villages that dotted the road's twisting route, but we did stop in the town of Kaigata. Mari had the presence of mind to ask a cabbie where to find a good lunch in that town, and he directed us to a place that we never would have found on our own. In fact, I'd bet not one visitor in a hundred finds it, because it was built into the warehouses owned and run by a fisherman's union.
Needless to say, the seafood specialties were numerous, cheap and quite outstanding. I can say without hesitation that that place was among the best restaurants that I've visited in Japan. And not just in terms of "value" but I mean the food would have been the pride of any swanky place in Tokyo that charged five times as much.
I tried three forms of fish dish. My main was a salted baked affair that was perfect. I thought to see whether Ken would eat them and he took to the small pieces I fed him with gusto. Mari's main was the slightly-braised shashimi that was so fresh I'm sure it had only been out of the water for hours. And the slight braising brought out even more than the usual rich shashimi flavours. A common side-dish to both was the slow-cooked fish face in which even the bones had softened to the consistency of a European chocolate cake. My father-in-law ate everything but the hard ball that sits inside the eye. I decided to randomly eat through part of the skull and found the texture entertaining but decided that devouring the whole skull was a bit pointless when the rest of the meal was so outstanding.
Even the smaller side dishes were great. Really great. The miso was also simply delicious, with beads of fish oil on the surface in a way I'd never seen before with Japanese soup. Without hesitation I would put this up with some of the best miso I've had anywhere (usually home-made).
The place was simply named Okan, and was run by the Kaigata fisherman's association.
By nightfall, we got to our hotel on the southern end of the mainland. Tomorrow we're going to a unique site: the world's only all-natural sand hotsprings. It's the happy confluence of a spring-fed hotspot that pushes the (very) hot water up through a beach. The sand is a heavy black stuff of volcanic origin. The site is run by the town (of Niwashi) and is open to the public for a nominal charge.