Japan Trip 2026: Kyushu

In March of 2026 I returned to Japan for the first time in decade. Although I landed in Tokyo and did visit other places, some famous, some not so famous, the bulk of my time this trip was spent in Kyushu where I was on a group tour with Rascal + Thorn. While in Kyushu we did some standard tourist things, but the majority of our time was spent touring distilleries.

An entire post will eventually be written about the various whisky distilleries I toured in Japan. I had previously toured distilleries and breweries in Japan, Scotland, and of course Canada, but distilleries seem to try really hard to differentiate themselves so although we toured nine they were all different some didn’t even make whisky yet…

Although I’d lived and traveled in Japan before including visiting when I was in high school in the 90s I’d never been to Kyushu. Of course I’d been to Honshu and I’d twice visited Hokkaido, plus I visited a friend who living in Shikoku so this trip crossed off the final major island in Japan. Before going I really did wonder if this would be my last trip to Japan, but seeing how popular it is with relatives, coworkers and friends maybe I visit again in ten or twelve years to you know, see how the whisky aged.

Kagoshima

Kagoshima is pretty amazing, I wish I had taken the time to explore it more. There is an actual volcano in the harbour which we never climbed, there is of course a famous shrine on that island. The city is also famous for both samurai and the Meji restoration. I didn’t go to that museum either though some in our tour group did. What we did use Kagoshima for was as a base to explore the Southern tip of Kyushu.

So although I may not have done all the A-List attractions I do have a bunch of pictures and did buy a fridge magnet and of course some whisky for my friend Bill.

Kumamoto

Kumamoto is the city that gave us Kumamon. He is so famous I kept forgetting the name of the actual city. This was possibly the nicest hotel we stayed at. Maybe we stayed at other nicer hotels, both the ones I stayed at in Tokyo were nice and the ones I chose in Nara and Toyohashi were super convenient, but this hotel room I was assigned was huge. I had a corner room and a city view. It is too bad I didn’t have this view in Kagoshima though I have plenty of pictures of the volcano as we drove around.

There was an entire store devoted to Kumamon but once again I never walked around that much. Our days were packed and our nights generally involved a group dinner and a visit to a whisky bar. Kagoshima and Kumamoto have less famous bars than Tokyo or Fukuoka or Chichibu. It is hard to say where we got the best food or the best whisky, but there is absolutely no doubt which city has the most famous mascot. I should have bought a plushy or some more nicknacks as apparently they would have been in demand, more so than whisky and biscuits which I brought back as omiyage.

Kumamoto is also the home of the artist behind One Piece so you see anime stuff all over Japan but One Piece dominates this particular train station.

Fukuoka

Although I was most looking forward to Kagoshima and Kumamon is impossible to forget, the city the surprised me the most was Fukuoka. It is bigger than I thought it would be for one, it had a big bar district. For someone who lived in Japan for a year, I never spent a lot of time in the bar districts. I did visit Roppongi and of course drank in Sapporo and Kyoto, however I was a poor English teacher saving for grad school. This trip I was considerably less poor and with a bunch of people who planned to drink most every night they were in Japan.

This is also the city where we briefly got lost. I of course insisted we were heading away from the train station and thus our hotel. But apparently the phone and map we were following was directing us away from Hakata station. Eventually we asked a third party and he indeed took us back to a major road and pointed to the train station, but we were on the wrong side of it. This cabbie had taken us not where we wanted to go. In everyone’s defence there were three Forza hotels around Hakata station, we were in one on the East side, how I remembered it was the Hub pub and eventually I put a pin in the map for our hotel, but it wasn’t me who ordered the cab. This turned into an extra late night as we walked around Fukuoka trying to find the exact Forza hotel we were staying at.

Fukuoka was also where we said our goodbyes. Some people travelled on to Hiroshima, some to Kyoto, some back to America via Tokyo and me I travelled on alone to Nara, Toyohashi, and before going back to Tokyo and flying back to Calgary.

Fukuoka is apparently famous for ramen, but I’m not sure I got a bowl, certainly not at anywhere famous. We did go for ramen in Chichibu and I got a bowl in the airport but we ate a variety of Japanese food rather than sticking to the sensible all ramen diet. I’ve been to Ippudo before, I documented ramen shops in Shanghai extensively. We did apparently have ramen in Kagashima. We twice tried to get into the izakya pictured above, but our group was too big at seven people. Some bars and restaurants in Japan, especially rural Japan are very small indeed.

Rural Kyushu

When travelling around Kyushu we used first Kagoshima, then Kumamoto, and finally Fukuoka as an our base. Somedays we had a driver in a “jumbo taxi”, some days we took a train, or even a series of trains to get to a more remote location. Cabs were definitely taken on one particular day and were often used at night to get back to our hotel, famously not working out perfectly at least once. We also used Ubers for this purpose and of course trams. I even recall walking to one brew pub by myself after spending time doing the laundry in Kagoshima. Suffice to say a lot of smaller towns and villages were passed through and maybe I should have taken more exhaustive notes, but I did not keep a journal nor lug a laptop around with me this trip.

Smartphone metadata often knows where a photo was taken so as I scatter images around this post and the whisky distillery touring post more rural areas in Kyushu will appear as we spent a lot of time travelling not just hanging out in Kagoshima, Kumamoto, and Fukuoka drinking, eating, and shopping. I famously did the least shopping and I tried to buy something at most every distillery we visited and of course got omiyage including many fridge magnets.

Reading Material

When I travel I try to read novels or books by local authors. When I visited Scotland I read Irvine Welsh, as I travelled all over China I read various authors and books on China. When I was taking trains in Germany specifically from Bavaria to Bohemia I read Candide and Nietzsche so as part of my planning for a return to Japan I ordered the latest book by Murakami, Ryu Murakami.

In “From the Fatherland, with Love” the North Koreans invade Japan, specifically Fukuoka. On my flight to Tokyo I did not read much, nor did I read much on our first couple train rides and there is always your smartphone to waste time on, but as the trip went on I read this book more. I didn’t even go out drinking one night in Fukuoka and instead did the laundry and read this book. I never managed to finish it before I got home, but I learned a lot about Fukuoka geography from a book about it being invaded, alas I learned most of this after we left and already gotten lost.

Onward to Nara

A coworker who may eventually read this suggested I go to Nara as I’d never been. I of course visited Kyoto along with Himeji when I lived in Japan back in 2004. However I’d never been to Nara. I really wanted to visit Matsumoto castle but it just wasn’t convenient. It would have been more convenient to visit Nagoya castle which somehow I’ve never toured even though I’ve visited Nagoya many times. I even looked at flying home from that airport. In the end to I decided to spend two nights in Nara which I documented next.

Feel free to leave any comments or questions you have about Kyushu, I’m far from a Kyushu expert but it was definitely nice.

This entry was originaly posted on March 29th, 2026, it was last edited on April 17th, 2026 and is filed under: Travel and tagged: Fukuoka, Kagoshima, Kumamoto.