Words and photographs by Christopher P. Hill
July 10, 2026

An immersive new tour of northwestern Kyushu explores Japan’s historic gateway to the outside world, with plenty of onsen soaks and culinary discoveries along the way.

A kimono-clad staffer at the Yuyado Unzen Shinyu hotel; a line of torii gates at Suwa Shrine in Nagasaki. — *Left to right:* A kimono-clad staffer at the Yuyado Unzen Shinyu hotel; a line of *torii* gates at Suwa Shrine in Nagasaki.

Matsukaze—wind in the pines. It’s a sound with particular resonance in Japan, where the same word describes the hiss of a boiling tea kettle. Here among the million wind-twisted black pines of Niji no Matsubara, on a gray and gusty January morning, the matsukaze takes on a low, almost plaintive register as we thread our way through the grove’s springy litter of pine needles. Beyond the trees lie the shores of Karatsu Bay. The crash of surf now fills our ears. With the wind clutching at our jackets, we head up the beach toward a hill crowned by a five-tiered castle.

I’m not usually a tour person, but I doubt I would have found Karatsu on my own, let alone many of the other places we visit on this excursion in northwestern Kyushu. So I’m glad I entrusted Walk Japan with my first visit to the island. Sure, you sacrifice some freedom to small-group dynamics—no lingering late over breakfast for us—but you also open yourself to experiences you might not otherwise have had. And if you don’t speak a word of Japanese—my own vocabulary doesn’t extend beyond a couple of words, one of which is now matsukaze—traveling with a fluent and knowledgeable guide is a major plus, especially in Japan’s less mainstream destinations.

And Walk Japan does it better than most. The company was founded in the early 1990s by a pair of Hong Kong University academics, with an eye to lifting visitors out of the usual tourist hubs of Tokyo and Kyoto and introducing them to the delights of a more rustic Japan. Their earliest walking tours followed the Nakasendo, an ancient footpath between Kyoto and Edo (present-day Tokyo) once traversed by feudal lords and their samurai retainers. Walk Japan’s offerings have since expanded to encompass all four of the country’s main islands, from serious hikes in Hokkaido to seasonal snowshoeing in the Central Alps of Honshu, with tours capped at a dozen people.

The trip I’m on is a new addition to the lineup: a 10-day excursion called Saga and Nagasaki: Cultural Crossroads. Named for two of Kyushu’s smaller prefectures, the itinerary will see us travel by chartered coach, train, ferry, and foot through a region that once served as Japan’s gateway to the outside world. Hiking boots are optional—this is one of Walk Japan’s easier programs, with an average of five kilometers of walking per day. Nothing too strenuous. And with our luggage transported between hotels each morning, all we need to carry is our day packs.

It’s also something of a dry run. Instead of paying guests, our group of nine consists of travel writers and Walk Japan employees here to familiarize themselves with the route ahead of its official launch. Joining us is the company’s CEO, Paul Christie, who has called Japan home for nearly 40 years. An Englishman with an affinity for the Japanese countryside, he lives with his wife, Mihoko, in a farming village on northeastern Kyushu’s Kunisaki Peninsula, where he also oversees the company’s rural revitalization efforts.

*Left to right:* The Niji no Matsubara pine grove; the ferry crossing from Shimabara to Kumamoto.

“Our tours are not just about providing guests with genuine local experiences,” Christie tells me over dinner in Fukuoka, Kyushu’s largest city and the starting point for the tour. “They’re also about spreading the benefits that tourism brings to the less-visited regions of Japan.”

He says it’s taken a year and a half to work out the details of this new itinerary, which he stitched together with the help of our mild-mannered tour leader, Ben Corbett, another Briton who has lived in Nagasaki since 2002. The result promises to be an immersive journey through one of Japan’s most historically layered—and still surprisingly underexplored—corners.

As the tour’s name suggests, the region we will be traversing has a long history of cross-cultural exchange. Just 200 kilometers of water separate Kyushu from the Korean Peninsula, so it was here that Buddhism, Confucian thought, and writing first reached ancient Japan. In the picturesque pottery towns of Okawachiyama and Arita, we learn how skilled potters captured during Japan’s abortive 16th-century invasions of Korea were brought to Saga to lay the foundations of the local porcelain industry. It’s a legacy that lives on in the prefecture’s luminous Arita ware, renowned for delicate motifs painted in shades of cobalt blue and brilliant red.

Western influences arrived early in Kyushu, too. Apart from the food and architecture of Hirado and Nagasaki (more on that later), you can see it in the design of Karatsu’s historic Takatori Residence, the onetime home of a prominent coal baron. While an in-house Noh theater and beautifully painted cedar sliding doors are among its most sublime features, the residence, built in 1905 at the height of the modernizing Meiji era, also reflects the period’s elite appetite for Western conveniences, from rolled-glass windows and electric lights to plaster ceilings and coal-burning fireplaces. There’s even a grand piano.

A room at the Yoyokaku ryokan in Karatsu; the seed cone of a sago palm in Hirado. — *Left to right:* A room at the Yoyokaku *ryokan* in Karatsu; the seed cone of a sago palm in Hirado.

*Left to right:* One of the tour’s bus drivers; freshly plucked leaves at tea farm near Hasami.

It’s a similar story in the cool heights of Unzen Onsen, one of our last stops. Set on the slopes of an active volcano amid steaming fumaroles and boiling mud pools, the hot-spring town emerged in the late 19th and early 20th centuries as a summer retreat for expatriates based in treaty ports like Nagasaki, Shanghai, and Hong Kong, complete with Western-style hotels, a golf course, and teams of porters on hand to carry visitors up the mountain in sedan chairs.

Our accommodations along the way are a good mix of ryokan inns and hotels. Amid the cedar-clad hills and rice terraces of Nagasaki’s Sechibaru Valley, we spend a night at Yama Noren, a modernist take on the onsen hotel by Kisho Kurokawa, one of Japan’s most influential postwar architects. Though it’s technically closed for renovations during our visit, Corbett arranges for the property to open its doors just for us.

Our rooms in the hills of Hirado come with their own stone-clad ofuro tubs; in the tea-growing hot spring town of Ureshino, we check in to a hotel whose mineral-rich onsen waters are said to promote bihada, or “beautiful skin.” Yet none match the quiet charm of Yoyokaku, where we spend our first night. Set in a quiet residential neighborhood of Karatsu, the elegant ryokan has been run by the Okochi family for five generations; Jacques Mayol, the French free-diving legend who inspired the 1988 Luc Besson film The Big Blue, was a frequent guest. The inn’s tatami-matted guest rooms look out to a garden of meticulously pruned pines; inside, minimalist spaces are accented by pieces of Karatsu’s prized wabi-sabi pottery. Yoyokaku is also where I perfect (with the help of Corbett) my yukata- and happi– wearing skills. Apart from being required by ryokan etiquette, the traditional robes and jackets are agreeably loose and comfortable after a day’s excursion, as well as a fitting complement to our multicourse kaiseki dinner.

The food throughout the trip is outstanding; as one of our party quips halfway through, we seem to be doing more eating than walking. There are numerous kaiseki spreads, served by kimono-clad staff in private rooms around low banquet tables quickly laden with seasonal dishes almost too pretty to eat: glistening pollock roe with bonito flakes; paper-thin puffer-fish sashimi; Saga beef in green-tea broth. Some nights we dine out at an unpretentious izakaya. Lunches are even more varied. At the seaside spa town of Obama Onsen—home to the longest public footbath in Japan—we pile our trays with raw seafood and vegetables to be steamed in hot-spring waters. Another day, Ben is particularly excited to introduce us to the “siege food” of Shimabara: guzoni, a hearty soup of mochi rice cakes, burdock root, shiitake, and myriad other ingredients said to have sustained rebels besieged inside Hara Castle during the 1637 Shimabara Rebellion.

The main street in Hirado; guzoni in Shimabara. — *Left to right:* The main street in Hirado; *guzoni* in Shimabara.

The grassy heights of Hirado’s Kawachi Pass offer sweeping views of the Kujuku Islands and the Genkai Sea.

Hirado Island is a highlight for me. Connected to mainland Kyushu by a torii-red suspension bridge, this was one of Japan’s earliest international trading ports, even before Nagasaki—and later Yokohama—emerged as the country’s dominant entrepôts. Ruled for more than 650 years by the Matsura clan, whose rebuilt castle looms above the harbor, Hirado is where the 12th-century Buddhist monk Eisai returned after studies in Song-dynasty China, bringing with him Zen teachings and tea plants. In the 1550s, Portuguese traders sailing from Macau arrived with refined sugar and other foreign luxuries. Hirado is also where a certain fortune-seeking English mariner landed at the turn of the 17th century and came to embrace the ways of the samurai. His name was William Adams, and his story was the basis for James Clavell’s historical novel Shōgun.

I love everything about Hirado. The 16th-generation confectionery, Tsutaya, with its pinecone-shaped monaka wafers, rich hot chocolate, and casdoce—a syrup-soaked sponge cake introduced by Portuguese missionaries. The thatch-roofed teahouse on the grounds of the Matsura Historical Museum, which preserves the rare Chinshin-ryu samurai tea tradition developed here in the 17th century. The views of the island-studded Genkai Sea from the summit of Kawachi Pass, where the lowering sun sets fields of feathery pampas grass aglow.

No less memorable is our lunch spot. Filled with eclectic decor and offering an equally varied menu (seafood paella, Thai green curry), Café Akashiya occupies a historic wooden trading house in the waterside Tasukecho neighborhood. Our host is an elderly gentleman named Tsugio Nagayama, who runs the place with his Philippine-born wife, Christina. After lunch, he takes us on a tour of the property, including the back salon where, he says, representatives of the Satsuma and Choshu clans—among them Saigo Takamori, a key leader of the Meiji Restoration—first met in the 1860s to plot the overthrow of the Tokugawa shogunate. True or not, it makes for a fascinating story.

Some 90 kilometers southeast of Hirado as the crow flies, the cosmopolitan city of Nagasaki is a departure from Walk Japan’s usual focus on lesser-visited locales. Yet it’s no less fascinating for that, with so much to see that we stay for two nights. This is Corbett’s adopted hometown, and his knowledge runs deep. Upon arriving from Ureshino via a 20-minute hop on Japan’s shortest shinkansen line, we make a beeline for Dejima, a fan-shaped artificial island built in 1636 to confine the activities of Portuguese traders and missionaries. Their tenure proved short-lived; in the wake of the Catholic-led Shimabara Rebellion, the shogunate expelled the Portuguese from Japan and turned the island over to the Dutch. Subsumed by nearly two centuries of land reclamation projects, Dejima has since been faithfully reconstructed, its tidy rows of Edo-style warehouses and residences attesting to a time when this was Japan’s sole window to the West.

*Left to right:* Nagasaki’s historic Megane-bashi bridge; a guest room at Karatsu’s Yoyokaku.

*Left to right:* An artisan at the Takayama ceramics factory in Hasami; an orientation plate on Mount Myoken.

Home as well to the country’s oldest Chinatown and a Meiji-era European quarter known as Hollander Slope, Nagasaki retains a surprising wealth of historical sites—surprising, that is, for a city ravaged by an atomic bomb on an overcast August morning in 1945. But unlike Hiroshima, which had been almost completely destroyed three days earlier, Nagasaki was spared total destruction when the bomb detonated over the Urakami Valley north of downtown rather than above its intended target: the Mitsubishi shipyards and arms factories near the harbor. The surrounding hills helped contain much of the blast.

Knowing this lends a certain providential quality to our wanderings around the city, visiting sites that, but for a fluke of weather and terrain, would have been obliterated in an instant: the hillside Suwa Shrine, the Teramachi temple district, the green-spired Oura Cathedral, the old stone bridges crisscrossing the Nakashima River. Another vestige of the past is Glover House, a sprawling bungalow set among gardens above the harbor. Built in 1863, it was the residence of Thomas Glover, a Scottish merchant who supplied arms to the anti-shogunate Satsuma and Choshu clans and helped modernize Japan’s coal industry. He was also involved in founding the brewery that would later become Kirin; some say the flowing whiskers of the mythical creature adorning Kirin beer labels are a tribute to Glover’s own impressive mustache. Another staple of local lore holds that his house was the home of Cio-Cio-San, the tragic heroine of Puccini’s Madame Butterfly. While there’s no truth to the tale, it’s easy enough to picture poor Butterfly standing vigil on the veranda, waiting for her faithless American husband to return.

Corbett also navigates us through Nagasaki’s singular culinary landscape, introducing us to champon—a rich noodle soup developed by Chinese immigrants in the Meiji era—and kakuni manju, steamed buns filled with braised pork belly. Tempura, derived from the Portuguese dish peixinhos da horta, also took root here. The lightly battered version we share one night at a cozy izakaya is accompanied by other Chinese-influenced specialties like sara udon and hatoshi, minced prawn paste sandwiched between slices of deep-fried bread. Then there’s toruko raisu (literally, “Turkish rice”), an unlikely assemblage of rice pilaf, spaghetti, and pork cutlet with curry sauce. The dish has no connection with Turkey—or anywhere else that I can ascertain—but it’s been served at the city’s oldest café, Tsuruchan, since the 1920s, making it a quintessential taste of Nagasaki.

Two days later, after riding a cable car to the frosty summit of Mount Myoken and visiting well-preserved samurai houses in Shimabara, we hop a ferry across the Ariake Sea to Kumamoto, the last stop on our tour. Dozens of mewing gulls trail us across the water, snatching shrimp crackers from the outstretched hands of passengers on the rear deck. My attention is drawn instead to the receding coastline of the mountainous Shimabara Peninsula—our final glimpse of Nagasaki Prefecture—and I find myself wishing we were headed back in that direction.

Overlooking the city of Nagasaki from the observation deck atop Mount Nabekanmuri.

Walk Japan’s 10-day Saga and Nagasaki: Cultural Crossroads tour costs JPY670,000 (about US$4,250) per person, based on twin sharing, including stays at local hotels and inns, most meals, and travel to and from Fukuoka.

This article originally appeared in the June/July 2026 print issue of DestinAsian magazine (“Steps in the Right Direction”). Buy a single issue or subscribe here.

Discovering Nagasaki and Saga in Kyushu with Walk Japan