Kyushu, Japan, is an island that’s long engaged with foreigners and still wants tourists, too | Canada Voices

It was late autumn when I landed in Kagoshima, in Kyushu – the southernmost and second-smallest of Japan’s major islands – but I could feel its subtropical mugginess from deep inside the terminal. Outside, chenille sheets of humidity melted into the morning’s livid mist, and as our tour group’s bus pulled onto the highway and into dark forest, the road ahead quickly emptied.

This was not the thronging, glittering Japan I knew from past trips to Tokyo, Kyoto and Osaka – the megacities so commonly visited by first-timers they’re nicknamed the Golden Route. For me, their clamour is comfortable. I’d never been to Kyushu, and this quiet, this countryside, this difference – it made me itch a little.

The bus passed a building topped by a giant, bushy-browed puppet: Kyushu’s beloved native son, the 19th-century warrior Saigo Takamori, according to our tour guide, Otani Hiroko. When Saigo – the inspiration for the principled Katsumoto in The Last Samurai – believed that the shogun, who had closed the country’s borders for 200-plus years, was failing to defend Japan’s traditional values from foreign encroachment, he helped overthrow him; he later led a doomed rebellion against the Meiji government’s own Westernizing reforms, which further eroded the Japanese cultural values forged in isolation.

A bit on the nose.

Since my last visit, Japan has been gripped by a debate over its booming tourism industry. Last year, it welcomed a record 42.7 million visitors, putting the government’s goal of 60 million by 2030 within reach, further fuelling resentment over kanko kogai, or “tourist pollution.” Gaijin outsiders have strained transit and squeezed locals out of restaurants, sacred sites and daily routines, especially along the Golden Route.

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Viral reports of bad behaviour – consuming gravesite offerings, damaging cherry trees, blocking trains for selfies – have rankled a rule-bound society. The nationalist-right party Sanseito has surged in popularity by declaring itself as the defender of Japan’s distinctive culture against a “silent invasion” of both immigrants and tourists.

The government has responded by hiking tourist fees (albeit reasonably) and reforming a popular tax-free program. It has even fanned the flames, blaming tourists for rice shortages while the prime minister amplified unfounded rumours that foreign visitors had kicked the city of Nara’s famous deer. “If you look at Japanese media, liberal or conservative, the frustration is increasing as the tourist numbers increase,” Fukuoka University tourism professor Tanaka Toshihiro told me.

This time, I set out wondering: How will a society so sensitive to disrespect handle ever greater tourist encroachment? How would visitors fumbling through more rural and isolated Kyushu be greeted in a place with even fewer English speakers – plus, apparently, a reverence for a samurai hero famously wary of outsiders?

Turns out, I had everything backward. Over 10 days in Kagoshima and northern Kyushu, I found an island that has long engaged with foreigners – and wants them. And travellers willing to stray from the Golden Route can be richly rewarded, if they’re willing to work a little harder.

For centuries, this island was the gateway to Japan for Europe and East Asia; Nagasaki’s port remained open during the shogun-imposed era of isolation. That’s led to a paradox: Kyushu is the cradle of some of Japan’s most protected and quintessential cultural assets – ceramics, tea, kimonos, Shintoism – but many only exist because of Kyushu’s initial exchange with foreigners.

The town of Arita in Saga, Japan’s fifth-least populated prefecture, is renowned for its white-and-blue porcelain made from local kaolin clay; even its shrine’s torii gates are tiled. I spent a gratifying afternoon shopping on Arita’s quiet main street, where ultramodern galleries sit beside rustic shops stacked high with Arita-ware, their elderly proprietors insisting on giving me bargains. And Kagoshima’s Chin Jukan kiln, where centuries of clay shards were scattered thick on the ground, has produced Satsuma-ware – with its ornate, crackled glazing – for 15 generations. Both styles are major Japanese exports – but were first created by Korean potters, many of whom were brought to Japan by force in the 16th century.

Today, ceramics are among Kyushu’s struggling traditional industries, in a microcosm of Japan’s deeper crisis: a rapidly aging population, plunging birth rates and youth abandoning their rural hometowns to find jobs. Such pressures have made the craftsmanship behind many Japanese cultural products feel increasingly untenable. For example, Chin Jukan’s artisans, once 800 strong, now number just 25.

Agriculture, one of Kyushu’s biggest industries, faces similar strain. Saga is known as the birthplace of Japanese tea cultivation – in the 12th century, a monk first planted seeds from China there – but many of the family farms that comprise the industry are dying as farmers age, prospective heirs move on, and fickle international tastes fixate on matcha, which cannot be produced everywhere. By one estimate, the number of Japanese tea farmers has plummeted by 75 per cent in 20 years.

This is the problem at the heart of Kyushu, and Japan at large: Its proud traditions must be protected, but at what cost, if they’re so preserved that they suffocate in amber?

The city of Ureshino’s growing “tea tourism” industry offers one answer. By helping visitors view green tea as a premium product, the community has changed how it sees itself, as well. “Locals used to think no one cared about our culture,” said Kawanami Ai, who led me in a private tea tasting perched above a mountaintop farm’s acres of flowing glossy green leaves. “Now, people have a lot of pride in their heart. They say, ‘oh, we have high value.’ ”

Shintoism, which locates many myths in Kyushu, also shows how some traditions might survive better through evolution.

With Shinto religious practice in decline, many sites now appeal to tourists, providing multilanguage signage explaining rituals, and offering amulets, fortunes and collectible stamp seals to support shrine upkeep. (Japan is so good at selling small keepsakes, even the most monkish are in on it.) Shrines delivered some of my trip’s most memorable moments: Hiking up the hush of the Yutoku Inari shrine outside Kashima until the wind sent thousands of prayers inside glass-bowl chimes chittering, and seeing a breathtaking 3,000-year-old camphor tree in Takeo that showed me why Shintoists believe that everything in nature has a soul.

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Of course, Kyushu isn’t immune to bad feelings. Last year, overtourism was blamed for water shortages in its onsen towns. While only about 13 per cent of Japan’s visitors went to Kyushu in 2025, the vast majority poured into its biggest city, Fukuoka, where anti-tourist sentiment is highest on the island. And at my request, Otani cheerfully pointed out every violation we came across, from coins placed on stones or thrown into ponds (“Japanese people don’t do this”) to large tour groups trampling over carefully laid gravel at sacred sites (“the sense of desecration is overwhelming”).

Exchange goes both ways. But meet people as they are – helpfully, Google Translate is a way of life in Japan – and you’ll be welcomed in Kyushu. It’s a place where you can put your trust in the craftsman chef-owner of an intimate and intimidating kappo countertop restaurant, and then have him excitedly share his favourite ceramics shops; where workers at remote temples perform more mundane blessings, like calling tourists a cab; where a cat might join your sunset walk along the Hama River; and where an elderly shopkeeper might beckon you in off a deserted street so she can proudly show you her giant salamanders.

Foreigners – and the mixed blessings we bring – are part of Kyushu’s story. No matter what the local samurai might say.

If you go

Canadians’ gateway to Japan will almost always be Tokyo – which is why first-time visitors will (and should) follow the Golden Route. But from there, it takes two hours to fly into Fukuoka, Kyushu’s biggest airport.

It’s a half-hour walk from the Arita JR train station to the porcelain-covered Tozan Shrine, but it’ll take hours to putter through the pottery shops on Sarayama-dori Avenue. Start at the Kyushu Ceramics Museum, have lunch at the Arita Porcelain Lab’s cafe, and finish up at the shrine. Cash is still king, here and in most of Kyushu.

The writer was a guest of the Japan National Tourism Office, which did not review or approve this article. Stories are based on merit; The Globe does not guarantee coverage.