Going to Kurokawaonsen, I stopped at Kusu.
They say the place is the fairy tale village because a guy who was called the Andersen of Japan was from Kusu.
There were big statues from the Momotaro (Peach boy) tale.
He was born from a peach, and he went to the island where demons lived to exterminate them with the help of a dog, a monkey, and a pheasant.
And I found a bread shaped like a red demon in the bakery there.
It was yummy with an apple filling.
This is a view from Komenoyama viewing platform in Fukuoka.
The day I went there wasn’t so clear, but you can look out over Hakata bay and Fukuoka city.
They say the night veiw is also beautiful.
It is good that people can go there by car.
This is anglerfish (Ankou) hot pot.
I ate this at a hotel.
It was good.
Hot pot is called Nabe in Japan.
Doing Nabe at home in winter is popular.
This is Hirado Xavier Church.
Francisco Xavier came to Hirado in 1550 and promoted Christianity.
There are many churches in Nagasaki.
And also many temples too, both are like in this picture.
I heard that churches usually have the same right and left side, but this one doesn’t because of lack of money.
The other day I went Hirado which is located North West of Nagasaki in Kyusyu Japan.
It is a nice town which has Japanese castle and a port.
In the early Edo era before national isolation, it had trade with foreign countries like Holland, Portugal and China.
The statues in this post are Jack Specks, who was the first director of the Hirado Dutch Trading Post and Richard Cocks, who was an English trader and cultivated sweet potatoes for the first time in Japan.
It was a rainy day, so we couldn’t go around many places and take pictures.
But I liked Hirado and want to visit there again.
Yesterday I went a salsa music festival (ISLA de SALSA 20th anniversary) on Nokonoshima island in Fukuoka.
Music, dancing, eating…
It was fun.
Though I posted about Nokonoshima before, there is island park there which has many flowers all year.
This time I found out that there are also water taxis that go to the island.
Mojiko, north of Fukuoka in Kyusyu, is the birthplace of ‘banana no tatakiuri’ (a seller who sells bananas at a greatly reduced price with a showy performance).
In the end of Meiji era, Mojiko was the port at the beginning of the train line.
So lot of bananas came from Taiwan and went to Kobe through Mojiko.
The bananas that got too ripe before going to Kobe had to be sold quickly in Mojiko.
So banana no tatakiuri began there.
