Kumamoto

The plain around the Shirakawa river was settled long before the city existed — decorated Kofun-period tombs are scattered across the prefecture — and a fortified house stood on the hill of Chausuyama by the 15th century. The city proper dates from 1588, when Katō Kiyomasa, a general in the service of Toyotomi Hideyoshi, was given half of the province of Higo. He rebuilt the hill fortress into the vast castle completed around 1607, famous for stone walls that curve outward so steeply that they were nicknamed musha-gaeshi, "repelling warriors", and he drained and diked the plain below it. The Katō were dispossessed in 1632 and replaced by the Hosokawa, who ruled Higo until the abolition of the domains and who laid out the garden at Suizen-ji.

In February 1877 Saigō Takamori's rebel army from Satsuma besieged the castle for some fifty days. The garrison held, but the keep and much of the interior had burned down two days before the general assault, in a fire whose cause was never established. The city that grew afterwards was a garrison and school town: the Fifth High School drew teachers including Lafcadio Hearn, who lived here in the early 1890s, and Natsume Sōseki, who taught English from 1896 to 1900 and wrote about the town's fogs and hot springs.

An Allied air raid in July 1945 destroyed about a fifth of the city. A concrete replica of the keep went up in 1960 and the castle became the city's emblem again. Kumamoto became a government-designated city in 2012. Four years later, in April 2016, two large earthquakes killed dozens of people, wrecked houses across the prefecture and brought down walls, turrets and roofs at the castle; restoration of the keep was completed in 2021, and the full repair of the walls and turrets is now scheduled to run to 2052.

Kumamoto thinks of itself as a samurai town, and the two figures it keeps closest are Katō Kiyomasa, remembered less as a warrior than as the engineer who tamed the rivers, and Miyamoto Musashi, the swordsman who spent his last years in Higo and wrote The Book of Five Rings in a cave in the hills west of the city. Local character is summed up in the word higo mokkosu, meaning stubborn, blunt and unwilling to bend, which people here use with some pride.

The crafts are distinctive. Higo zōgan is inlay work in which gold and silver are hammered into blackened iron, developed for sword fittings and now used for jewellery and ornaments. Yamaga, north of the city, makes paper lanterns, which dancers balance on their heads at its Bon lantern festival each August. Painted wooden toys — the popping Obake no Kinta puppet among them — are sold as souvenirs.

Festivals are loud. The Fujisaki Hachimangū autumn festival fills the streets with decorated horses and chanting teams, and summer brings the Hinokuni dance along the main avenue. The prefecture's black bear mascot, created in 2010 to promote the opening of the Shinkansen, became a national phenomenon and is now part of the city's public face, appearing on trams, shop fronts and packaging. Sport has a strong following, with rugby matches at the stadium beside the prefectural park and a long tradition of kendo and archery in the old schools.

About 740,000 people live in the city and roughly a million more across the prefecture. The compact centre is unusually lively for a Japanese city of its size, because the arcades kept their shops when others lost them to out-of-town malls, and because the trams make the middle of the city easy to reach without a car. Families mostly live in the outer wards and along the tram lines, in a mix of low blocks of flats and detached houses with small gardens.

Agriculture is the prefecture's traditional strength — tomatoes, watermelons, mandarins, rice and beef — and the city is its market and administrative centre, with prefectural offices, hospitals and Kumamoto University providing much of the steady employment. Since the early 2020s semiconductor manufacturing has changed the local economy sharply: a large chip plant built near the airport, east of the city, has drawn suppliers, raised wages and pushed up land prices and rents in the eastern suburbs, along with complaints about traffic and water use.

The rhythm of the day is provincial and unhurried. Shops in the arcades open mid-morning, offices empty into the izakaya lanes from early evening, and the last trams run well before midnight. Rebuilding after 2016 is still visible in scaffolding on temples and in the castle's roped-off stone walls, and the city runs regular disaster drills. Groundwater is a point of local pride: Kumamoto draws effectively all of its tap water from aquifers fed by rain on the Aso highlands.

Basashi, raw horse meat, is the dish visitors are steered towards first. It is sliced thin, marbled cuts alongside lean ones, and eaten with grated ginger, garlic, sliced onion and a sweet soy sauce; horse is also grilled, simmered or served as a sushi topping, and Kumamoto is one of the places in Japan, with Nagano and Ōita, best known for the dish. Karashi renkon is the other emblem: a lotus root stuffed with mustard and miso, battered with turmeric and deep-fried, which is said to have been devised to strengthen an unwell Hosokawa lord and is now sold sliced into yellow-ringed rounds.

Taipīen shows a different lineage. Brought by Chinese cooks and adapted here, it is a clear soup of glass noodles with pork, squid, prawns, cabbage and a fried egg, so ordinary in Kumamoto that it appears in school lunches. Kumamoto ramen is a tonkotsu broth softened with chicken bones and finished with mayu, black oil of fried garlic, over straight medium noodles. Dagojiru, a country soup of flat wheat-flour dumplings with root vegetables, belongs to the same plain tradition.

Local produce runs to akaushi, the red-brown Japanese beef raised on the Aso grasslands, to tomatoes and watermelons from the plain, and to mandarins from the Ariake coast. Ikinari dango, a steamed dumpling of sweet potato and red bean paste, is the everyday sweet, and honey-glazed karashi renkon or kumamon-stamped biscuits fill the souvenir shelves. The regional drink is shochu: rice shochu from Hitoyoshi in the south of the prefecture, protected under its own geographical name, and sweet-potato shochu from further down Kyushu.