Kyushu by car

From the shrine at Dazaifu to the steaming hells of Unzen, over mountain roads

The only route here you drive, and not for the romance of it: in Kyushu the trains run city to city and what this route is after sits in between. The Kunisaki peninsula, where Buddhism fused with mountain worship and left stone temples scattered across ten valleys, cannot be visited without a car at all. You leave Fukuoka by way of Dazaifu, cross to Kunisaki for two nights among fog and rice terraces, drop down to Yufuin, give four days to the Aso caldera — the largest in Japan, with villages and cattle living inside the crater — with a day out to the Takachiho gorge, then cross the Ariake Sea by ferry to Shimabara, a town built on spring water, and finish up in Unzen among the fumaroles. It grew out of a reader’s diary of the same trip in seven days; this is twelve, stretched exactly where he says he ran short.

The itinerary, stop by stop

1. Fukuoka2 days

   They were two cities facing each other across the Naka river: Hakata, the merchants' port with a thousand years of dealing with China and Korea, and Fukuoka, the samurai town the Kuroda clan built on the far bank. The name was settled by a hair's breadth in the council chamber, and Hakata kept the station, the dialect and the festivals. Tonkotsu ramen started here, and a hundred-odd yatai survive — over a third of all those left in Japan.

   You start here because of the airport and because of the car, in that order. Fukuoka's international airport sits inside the city and is the usual way into Kyushu, so the first day starts whole, with no domestic flight in the middle. It is also the one stop of the five that needs no steering wheel: both days work on foot and by train, so you pick the car up on the way out instead of paying two nights of parking. Day one is Hakata, the tonkotsu ramen where the style began and, after dark, the yatai along the Naka river: the Tenjin ones are less touristy than those in Nakasu, they do not open in the rain, they hold about ten stools, there is no toilet and only a minority take cards.

   Day two heads for Dazaifu, and here the catalogue corrects two things. The first is geographical: the shrine is not in Fukuoka but half an hour away by train from Tenjin, and neither is the Kyushu National Museum, which is joined to it by a tunnel with moving walkways. The second is that the main shrine is closed for its once-a-century rebuilding and worship happens in a temporary one with a forest roof designed by Sou Fujimoto, worth the trip in its own right. On the approach, some twenty shops griddle umegae mochi to order for around a hundred and fifty yen, and you eat it hot because it goes claggy cold. It is also the last morning without a car: from here the route is measured in roads, and none of them is long.

   What puts it in this route: Dazaifu Tenmangu Shrine · Umegae mochi on the Dazaifu approach · Yatai Food Stalls Along the Naka River · Original Hakata Tonkotsu Ramen

2. Kunisaki Peninsula and Usa2 days

   A round peninsula in northern Oita where the Tendai Buddhism that arrived via Usa Jingu fused with mountain asceticism and with the god Hachiman to produce something found nowhere else: the Rokugo Manzan culture, with Buddhas seven and eight metres tall carved into living rock, stone Nio guardians on every temple path, and the oldest wooden hall still standing in Kyushu. You drive it, through medieval rice terraces and fog.

   This is the stop that explains the car and, really, the stop that explains the route. Reaching the town without one is easy: the limited express on the Nippo line gets you from Hakata to JR Usa station in about an hour and thirty five, and from Oita airport, which lies inside the municipality of Kunisaki itself, the Northliner bus crosses the mountain to the Bungotakada terminal in fifty one minutes, cash only, no transport cards. The trouble starts afterwards. The temples are scattered across valleys linked by single lane mountain roads, and the bus that serves them comes two or three times a day, or not at all. Without a car you see one temple and then you wait.

   The peninsula is a worn out volcano: valleys run down from Mount Futago like the segments of an orange, and they are the six districts that give the Rokugo Manzan its name. The road crosses from one into the next, slowly, and first thing in the morning there are no cars and the mist is still lying low. You sleep two nights because a day holds three major stops and there are ten valleys. The first is the religious spine: Usa Jingu, mother house of the country's forty thousand or so Hachiman shrines, founded in the year 725; Futago-ji, halfway up the slope, with the largest stone Nio on the peninsula; and the Kumano Magaibutsu, an eight metre Fudo Myoo and a seven metre Nyorai carved into the cliff, up a staircase of loose stones for which the ticket office lends you a stick.

   The second day is the Tashibu valley: the Amida hall at Fuki-ji, small and dark in a clearing, which Bungotakada town hall calls the oldest wooden building still standing in Kyushu, and five minutes away Makiodo, with nine carvings kept in what was the image store of a temple that no longer exists. Around them, the medieval terraces of Tashibu-no-sho, flooded in April and holding the reflection of the mountain. Two awkward facts: when it rains they will not let you into the hall, and the fallback is the Oita prefectural history museum, which closes on Mondays. And you do not need to climb the Nakayama Senkyo ridge: the town hall's own website warns that fatal falls happen there regularly, and the Ebisu valley looks just as good from the viewpoint below.

   What puts it in this route: Futago-ji, the temple that runs the mountain · Fuki-ji and its Amida hall, a National Treasure · Usa Jingu, mother shrine of all Hachiman · Kumano Magaibutsu, Buddhas in the cliff

3. Yufuin1 day

   Three innkeepers formed an association in the early seventies to block a golf course and the coach-tour hotels, then paid out of their own pockets for a fifty-day study trip across Europe to bring back the idea of a spa town people actually live in. It worked too well: the street from the station to the lake is now a souvenir corridor, and the real Yufuin is in the side lanes, in the seven neighbourhood baths with an honesty box, and in Isozaki's station, with its foot bath on the platform.

   One night, and it is the only stop on the route that works that way. After two days of stone and forest, Yufuin is a deliberate change of register: open air baths looking at Mount Yufu, small galleries and the highest spending level the catalogue gives this route. The honest thing is to say what hours the village exists. The model worked too well, and the street from the station to the lake is now a corridor of souvenir shops where in high season you walk shoulder to shoulder between ten and four. Before nine and after half past five, once the coach tours leave, and in the side streets, it is a different place.

   With a car you can use that, which is half the reason the stop is here. The Sagiridai lookout, whose name literally means mist viewpoint, fills with cloud to the brim on cold clear dawns after a humid day, and there is no way up without a car or a taxi. Fifteen kilometres away is Yunohira Onsen, an Edo era spa climbing a cobbled slope three hundred years old, with communal baths at one or two hundred yen: this is what Yufuin was before tourism. And the village still has seven baths run by the neighbourhoods, most unstaffed with a coin box, where you bring your own soap and towel; the one by the lake, the Shitanyu, is mixed bathing.

   What puts it in this route: Onsen with views of Mount Yufu · The village before nine and after five

4. Kumamoto4 days

   The castle is still under repair after the earthquake, which is why a 300-metre elevated walkway lets you look straight at stone walls that are still down; at night it stays lit until dawn as a symbol of the rebuilding. East of the city opens the Aso caldera: with the crater closed because of the gas, what is left is the Kusasenri grassland and its horses, the Daikanbo lookout, and a museum relaying live feeds from cameras fixed inside the crater wall.

   Day trip to Takachiho Gorge

   Four days, and hardly any of them urban. From Yufuin you come down across the mountains and what opens on the other side is the Aso caldera, so large that it takes a while to grasp that you are already inside it: there are villages, roads and cattle living in the crater. The sensible split is two days driving around inside it, one for Takachiho and one for the city, which is exactly what the traveller's diary behind this route could not manage. Inside the caldera sit Aso shrine, whose twenty one metre tower gate collapsed in the 2016 earthquake and was not finished again until December 2023, and Kurokawa Onsen in the north, where a cedar wood disc buys you three open air baths at three different inns.

   The awkward part is a big one and best faced squarely: you cannot go into the Nakadake crater. The alert level rose to 3 in August 2026 and dropped to 2 on 1 September, but a one kilometre exclusion zone remains and it includes the rim viewpoint; the Aso toll road has been closed since a sightseeing helicopter crashed inside the crater itself in January 2026; and the ropeway some guides still mention does not exist, it was formally scrapped in December 2019. Plenty stays open: the Kusasenri grassland with its horses, the Komezuka cone, the Daikanbo caldera lookout and the Volcano Museum, which relays the inside of the crater from cameras fixed to its wall. The Daikanbo sea of clouds, though, is an October to December thing.

   The city day is the castle day. The keep has been restored and open since 2021, but the Honmaru Goten palace and several turrets are still shut and full restoration is not expected before 2052; what you actually remember is the three hundred metre elevated walkway that runs above the stone walls still lying collapsed, to which the July 2026 earthquake added some forty more breaches. It reopened on 13 August and is now lit until dawn, free to watch from the Ninomaru plaza. The Takachiho day has one specific trap: the gorge's rowing boats are booked online between two weeks and two days ahead and sell out in minutes in high season, so whoever does not book does not row, though the path beside the basalt columns and the Manai waterfall stays open regardless.

   What puts it in this route: Mount Aso's active caldera · Kusasenri Meadow on Mount Aso · Aso Shrine · Kurokawa Onsen and the nyuto tegata · Kumamoto Castle · Akaushi, the red ox of Aso · Gorge walk and rowboat ride · Nightly kagura at Takachiho Shrine

5. Shimabara and Unzen2 days

   A volcanic peninsula on the far side of the Ariake Sea, reached by ferry from Kumamoto. Down at sea level, Shimabara: a castle, a samurai street with a running water channel down the middle and carp living in it, because spring water comes up everywhere here. Up at 700 metres, Unzen Onsen and its thirty-odd jigoku venting sulphur steam. And between them, Mount Fugen and the memory of the 1991 eruption.

   The route ends by crossing water, and that is not a formality: going round the head of the Ariake gulf by road is an enormous detour, so the car goes onto a boat. There are two ways out of Kumamoto port. Kumamoto Ferry's Ocean Arrow is the fast one, about thirty minutes, six sailings a day each way and a seventh at weekends and holidays from April to December, at four thousand four hundred yen for a car under four metres with the driver included. Kyusho Ferry's conventional boat covers the twenty one kilometres in an hour, ten round trips from seven in the morning, and costs three thousand two hundred. With a car you must be at the quay half an hour before, and Kumamoto Ferry takes bookings a month ahead.

   Down below, Shimabara is a town of spring water, and it comes up everywhere. The place where that lands all at once is the Shimeiso, a wooden villa from the late Meiji years with a pond fed by some three thousand tonnes of spring water a day and carp moving half a metre from the tatami: you take your shoes off, sit down and do nothing else. Two blocks away, in Shinmachi, the channels along the houses carry water clean enough that the town put ornamental carp in them to live; and in Shimo-no-cho the street of lower ranking samurai houses has a stone channel running down the middle of the road, once the neighbourhood's drinking water and still fed by a spring two kilometres off, maintained by the residents themselves.

   Up at seven hundred metres, Unzen Onsen is a whole village of hotels and inns inside a national park dating from 1934, one of Japan's first three. In the middle of it is a bare slope with some thirty named fumaroles and wooden walkways between them: the jigoku, steam at a hundred and twenty degrees and acid sulphur, free and open at any hour, though unlit after dark. And one thing here is told plainly. The Gamadasu Dome, built on ground reclaimed from the sea with what came down off the volcano, sets out the eruption of November 1990 and the pyroclastic flow of 3 June 1991, which killed forty three people, among them journalists covering it and volcanologists studying it. On the Mizunashi river eleven houses still stand with the 1992 mud up to their eaves.

   What puts it in this route: Crossing the Ariake Sea from Kumamoto · Shimeiso, the garden of rising water · The jigoku of Unzen Onsen · Unzen Volcanic Disaster Memorial Hall · Staying in Unzen Onsen