what goes on in southern Kyushu
the journal of Michael Werneburg
twenty-seven years and one million words
On Reddit, someone posted a map of southern Kyushu and ask what life is like in the region. My response was:
I've visited Nichinan many times and have visited most of the other cities on the map at least once. Most of the smaller centers are one horse towns like mill towns, cities built around a couple of factories, that kind of thing. I can tell you it's rural enough that the kids roam around in the local flavor of modded cars on a Saturday night with nowhere to go. It's rural enough that they'll ask you to wear something to cover your tattoos at a water park.
There is boar hunting in the hills, right outside of "town limits". The fishing is excellent whether in small rivers, or on the coral reefs in the Philippine sea.
The traffic in Kagoshima seems to be unusually terrible for a city of its size. Kagoshima has shinkansen service, Miyazaki doesn't. The inter-city bus service is great.
The circular island in the bay next to Kagoshima is one of the most active volcanoes in the country, and there are a number of others. You can fairly routinely hear the bang of an eruption.
The prefecture of Miyazaki has a list of a few dozen natural sites and other things to see, and it's surprisingly worth doing - ranging from feral horses to a navigable gorge to ancient burial mounds built during the arrival of the Yamato people. A tour of the coast is quite beautiful. In Kagoshima, you can steel yourself and read letters from seventeen-year-old kamikaze pilots telling their mothers goodbye.
The Japanese language uses a voiced sound ('ka') for a question mark to differentiate questions from statements. But in the Miyazaki dialect they use a different word that sounds the normal Japanese word for 'and' so for about five years I was hearing sentences I took to be impartial statements from people trailing off with an "...and", not realizing it was the question marker. The dialect of Kagoshima is considerably more different from the norm that I won't even try to explain.