Kagoshima

Top things to do in Kagoshima

1. 01

   Sakurajima - the working volcano across the bay

   nature wildlife scenic 👍 Popular

   A ferry runs around the clock from the city port and takes about fifteen minutes. The mountain is genuinely active: small explosive eruptions happen on most days, often several hundred a year, and the alert level frequently sits at the step that closes the summit and upper flanks, so climbing it is not permitted and never has been an option for visitors. What you do instead is ride the observatories on the lower slopes. Yunohira is the highest point the public can reach and looks straight up the ash-streaked cone; Arimura Lava Observatory puts a boardwalk out over the lava that came down in the 1940s. Concrete evacuation shelters stand at intervals along the ring road, and the volcanic soil grows the giant Sakurajima daikon and the tiny Sakurajima mandarin.

2. 02

   Kurokami buried torii - a shrine gate swallowed by the 1914 eruption

   history ⭐ Highly recommended

   The Taisho eruption dumped metres of pumice and ash on the village of Kurokami and left the shrine's stone gate buried to the top of its crossbeam, which now stands about knee height above the ground. Villagers wanted to dig it out; the headman ordered it left exactly as it was, as a record for whoever came next. It is a two-minute walk off the ring road and the single most affecting thing on the island.

3. 03

   Sengan-en - the garden that borrows a volcano

   history scenic 👍 Popular

   The Shimadzu built their seaside villa here in the seventeenth century and used the oldest trick in Japanese landscaping on the grandest possible object: Sakurajima stands in as the garden's centrepiece hill and the bay does duty as its pond. Next door, the Shoko Shuseikan holds the machinery hall the domain built in the 1860s, the oldest surviving Western-style stone factory building in the country and part of the UNESCO listing for Japan's Meiji industrial sites, plus a working Satsuma Kiriko cut-glass workshop you can watch through the window.

4. 04

   Shiroyama Observatory - the whole city under the volcano

   scenic history 👍 Popular

   The wooded hill behind the centre gives the postcard view: tiled roofs, the bay, and the cone smoking on the far shore. It is best in the clear air of a winter morning and again after dark. Partway up the lane sits the cave where Saigo Takamori spent his last days in September 1877, hemmed in by the government army he had helped create, and the walk between the two is fifteen minutes through the trees.

5. 05

   Sakurajima's hot springs - bathing on an active volcano

   wellness ⭐ Highly recommended

   Water heated deep under the island comes up iron-rich and rust-brown, and the bathhouse near the ferry terminal points its windows at the bay. Along the shore below it runs a foot bath of about a hundred metres, one of the longest in the country, set into the lava flow with the mountain directly overhead. Bring a towel and expect to sit longer than you planned.

6. 06

   Museum of the Meiji Restoration - how one southern domain remade Japan

   history culture arts

   Built on the riverside block that produced both Saigo Takamori and Okubo Toshimichi, near-neighbours who ended up on opposite sides of a civil war. The main hall stages the Restoration as a theatrical set piece with animatronic figures, which sounds ridiculous and works, and the upstairs galleries cover the nineteen students the domain smuggled to Britain in defiance of the shogunate's travel ban.

7. 07

   Tenmonkan - the arcades, and the shaved ice they invented

   food shopping

   The covered shopping streets are the city's evening centre: shochu bars, tonkatsu counters and the parlour where shirokuma was invented, a mound of shaved ice under condensed milk and fruit named for the polar bear it resembles. Look for kibinago, the little silver-striped herring, laid out raw in a chrysanthemum fan with vinegared miso, and satsuma-age fish cakes eaten hot off the fryer.

8. 08

   Reimeikan and the Tsurumaru castle walls

   history

   The prefectural history museum occupies the site of the Shimadzu castle, which was always a low fortified residence rather than a keep, on the theory that the domain's real defence was its men. The moat and stone walls survive, pitted with marks from the fighting of 1877, and the enormous main gate has been rebuilt in traditional timber.

9. 09

   Kagoshima City Aquarium - whale sharks and the dolphin channel

   nature wildlife

   Beside the Sakurajima ferry pier, built around a deep tank holding whale sharks taken from local waters and released back to the bay once they outgrow it. The dolphins train in an open seawater channel that runs out through the harbour front, so you can watch them from the street without going in.

10. 10

    Kagoshima's black pork and black cattle

    food

    Kurobuta, the Berkshire pigs the domain first imported from the Ryukyus, are the local pride and turn up as thick tonkatsu, as shabu-shabu swirled through a light broth, and in the tonkotsu-and-chicken hybrid broth of Kagoshima ramen. The prefecture's black cattle have taken the top prize at Japan's national wagyu championship, which locals will mention.

11. 11

    Imo-jochu - the sweet-potato spirit

    food

    Satsuma's soil suited sweet potatoes rather than rice, so the region distilled instead of brewing, and the prefecture now has more shochu distilleries than any other. The local way to drink it is cut with hot water, often mixed a day ahead so the two settle together, and any decent izakaya keeps a wall of bottles from producers you will not see outside Kyushu.

12. 12

    Ishibashi Memorial Park - Edo stone bridges rescued from a flood

    history

    Five arched stone bridges built across the Kotsuki River in the 1840s stood for a century and a half until a catastrophic flood in 1993 destroyed two of them. The three survivors were dismantled, moved to the river mouth and rebuilt stone by stone, and now sit in a small park by the water with the volcano behind them.

Getting to & around Kagoshima

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