Japan Trip 2025

Fukuoka - Night of December 04 to morning of December 08

We flew into Fukuoka, from Perth. It's a city that I probably would never have visited if not for the walk that we're doing later on. Still, its an amazing city. We have an aparment for a day in Hakata, one of the downtown areas of Fukuoka. Its a very fun place, near a big canal and the river. We go walking around the first night that we're there, and find the Canal City Mall - I wouldn't say I'm really interested in the shopping side of things, but it has an amazing water system going through the middle which is really cool

The second day, we move to our other apartment - a little place in Tenjin, a hundred metres or so off the main street. It's amazing, and also, I would guess, less than 20 square metres - pretty small. It has a real artsy feel, with posters and design books.
This is the day that we also go out walking around the city a lot. We spend the morning just walking around the canal area and down the river more, to a lovely little garden with fish and a beautiful old temple in the Hakata old town.

In the afternoon, we move on to Fukuoka castle. This is our first Japanese castle of quite a few, and I find it particularly amazing how different they look from western castles. There are just massive walls on each side made from stones, which I find really amazing.

The castle grounds: our first Ginkgo!

Then, later, we go to the Fukuoka Art Museum, which is in the same park as the castle. There's a big series on the landscapes of Korea and Manchuria, and there's also a series of drawings of one guy who went all around Japan drawing different castles all around. It was especially cool since you could see him getting better as he went, and some of the last drawings were quite amazing. They also had loads of just amazing artifacts and things.

Note: not my photos, I found these online

After the art museum, we went briefly to a specialty tea and coffee place which also happened to have a jazz theme, and went back around the lake in the same park. This place is just amazing.

Dazaifu (December 6)

The next day, we head out on the train to Dazaifu. There's a famous temple here, but it also just looks like amazing country.
Dazaifu is, by far, the most tourist heavy place we'd been to so far. Thus far, we'd seen perhaps 3 or 4 Western tourists the whole time, but Daifuzu had quite a few more. It is an amazing area, with great gardens though. The main street was quite busy. One thing that was really cool was a place where they made mochi - below is their setup for making and flipping them, which I thought was just really cool.

We quickly walked through the temple area, passing all the touristy things to the paths around the back of the temple
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I'd found a mountain, mount Hōman, on Alltrails that looked interesting. It was quite a walk to get there, with about 2km just on a rural road before we even got to the main trail. Because we'd been in cities so far, this was the first time apart from looking out train windows that we'd seen proper fields and rural areas, and I just was really struck by how small all the fields are. Also, a lot of the roads had sides that were cut out of rock, in a way that feels so Studio Ghibli.

It also took us past another shrine, the Kamado shrine, which was another somewhat touristy place that a lot of people caught a bus up to, although it didn't look like many of the western tourists had made it that far. It was a beautiful place, though, and it was really just the perfect time for all the maples and ginkgos around there.

Of course, after this, I put away my phone and we, of course, walked up the wrong trail that wasn't the mountain, which looked to be, once we figured it out, a fire access track. There were some amazingly cute signs here of firefighters rescuing animals though, and the forest was just beautiful.

Eventually, though, we found Mount Hōman, with a trailhead that really was something that we should have noticed before. It was, simply put, beautiful. They'd mentioned on the train to Dazaifu (there's a specially decorated train) that this mountain had a thousand stone steps - I'm not sure what their definition of steps was, because I couldn't really make out any of them. Half of the way was boulders that we had to clamber over, or dirt.

From the bottom, the trail said that it was an 8km walk up the mountain, and that the mountain was 829m. We'd already walked a lot that day (my watch says the total was 22.3km) and didn't intend to do the whole thing. It was quite a strong gradient, too. But it was a nice day, and we just kept saying we'd do one or two more kilometers, until we were at about 2km from the top and we'd really started to have enough of walking but, at that point, we couldn't really have turned around, could we? We were also helped on by the fact that half the people who we were passing going the other way looked like they were about 70 years old and seemed to be handling it with ease. It was a hard trail, though, with long stretches of quite steep gradient, and all the food that we had were some chocolates and a small packet of chips that we'd bought at a Lawson in Fukuoka.

Eventually, though, we reached the peak. There were quite a few people up there, eating food that they'd brought up, or sitting on the massive boulders. There was also a small shrine up the top, which was kind of amazing how they'd brought up all the stuff up here, considering that the shrine looked quite old and we found it difficult enough to get up ourselves. Little did we know that this would become quite a theme of remote places that we would go to later on -- amazingly complicated and quite large buildings in very hard to access areas.

On our way back to Fukuoka, we caught a bus from the Kamado shrine back into Dazaifu train station, which ended up being quite a crowded bus. I took a few photos of the town around there -- I just thought the area and some of the buildings were beautiful in the light.

Yanagawa (December 7th)

The next day, we caught the train down on the same line to Yanagawa, which was about 50 minutes from Fukuoka.

Yanagawa's main tourist attraction is that it's got a large network of canals that goes through the city -- that, and the fact that eel is quite a regional specialty in all the restaraunts there. When we got off the train, we immediately went to the closest canal boat tour place. The boat that we were on seated about 10 people with a boatman up the front poling it up the canal, and under the table in the center it was heated by little pots of coals, with blankets surrouunding the table to keep the warmth in.

Thanks for reading!

Camera: Mostly Google Pixel 7 Pro, with some photos from Pixel 8a
Note: I haven't removed the EXIF data (including GPS coordinates) from these photos, so if you want the location you can download them and inspect the data.