Four keys to Kagoshima
Kagoshima Prefecture is home to Sakurajima, an active volcano that erupts on an almost daily basis, and stretches across a chain of islands running some 600km from Yakushima and Tanegashima through the Tokara Islands to the Amami archipelago — arguably the most extreme natural landscape of any prefecture in Japan. One key is the region's long memory of living alongside ash falls and colossal eruptions. Another is the Descent of the Grandson myth and the urban legends that grew from it. A third is the culture of visiting deities that survives, largely intact, on the remote islands. And the last is the fact that "nature," "the uncanny," and "history" are rarely told together in ordinary guidebooks. This site walks through all four, room by room.
Explore the site
Each page stands on its own. Start wherever catches your eye — from folklore to the natural record.
Grown in volcanic ash: the world's heaviest radish and its smallest mandarin.
Read →A mysterious spear on the peak of the Descent myth. Did Sakamoto Ryoma really pull it out?
Read →7,300 years ago, an eruption among the largest of the last 10,000 years may have ended a Jomon culture.
Read →Chiringashima and Yoron's Yurigahama: landforms that appear only at low tide.
Read →A 1978 mass sighting, and the debate over what really lives in Kyushu's largest caldera lake.
Read →Only on Akuseki Island: a masked visiting deity found nowhere else in Japan.
Read →A UNESCO-listed visiting deity who appears only on New Year's Eve to counsel — and reward — children.
Read →The exile island of Iwo-jima, where one of the Tale of the Heike's most tragic episodes is set.
Read →The southern cape said to be where Urashima Taro set off for the Dragon Palace beneath the sea.
Read →Behind the "7,200-year-old" Jomon Sugi lies a real debate over how old it actually is.
Read →The world's biggest crane wintering ground, plus shirokuma, black pork, and sweet-potato shochu.
Read →Overview
The full stories are on their own pages. Here's just the outline.
This eruption formed the northern part of Kagoshima Bay, and the pyroclastic flow deposits became the "Shirasu" plateau that covers much of southern Kyushu.
South of the Satsuma Peninsula, an eruption thought to be among the largest on Earth in the last 10,000 years struck, devastating Jomon culture across southern Kyushu.
Portuguese traders shipwrecked on Tanegashima brought the matchlock gun, which would go on to change the way Japan's Warring States conflicts were fought.
From the great Anei eruption onward, Sakurajima has erupted repeatedly on a historic scale; the 1914 Taisho eruption connected it by lava flow to the Osumi Peninsula.
Recovering from the Teradaya Incident, Ryoma and his wife Oryo are said to have traveled to Kirishima, where he supposedly pulled out the "Heavenly Sakahoko" atop Takachiho-no-mine.
Recording hundreds of explosive eruptions a year, it remains one of the world's most active volcanoes — a daily fact of life for the people of Kagoshima City.