I used the weekend for a quick trip to Yamaguchi. I was worried about traffic, so I left at 5 a.m., and luckily got there in just four hours. Once I crossed the prefectural border into Yamaguchi there wasn’t a single car on the road, which made driving easy. Apart from Route 2, Yamaguchi felt like a quiet, sleepy prefecture overall. It’s the countryside of the countryside, even by Japanese standards. The only prefectures that could rival it might be Kochi or Akita… hmm…
Hagi is famous for its pottery and for the Meiji Restoration. Its pottery became famous thanks to the Korean potters taken to Japan during the Imjin War (the Japanese invasions of Korea in the 1590s), and it’s also where the revolutionaries of the Meiji Restoration, which changed the course of Japanese history, grew up, so you can’t really say the town has nothing to do with Korea. The air of the Restoration still lingers all over town. Having become rich and powerful thanks to the success of the Meiji Restoration, Japan went on to launch its wars of aggression in East Asia… It’s interesting to think that it all may have started here, in this small country town called Hagi. The more you learn about history, the more ironic and romantic it gets. That’s why I can’t give it up.
The Kita-Nagato Coast Quasi-National Park.
There was a spectacular stretch of coast full of strangely shaped rocks. It just unfolded on the way to Hagi, our destination, and that’s the joy of heading off on a trip without planning. We got out for a bit and took in the coastline.
The crater of Mount Kasayama
Apparently it’s the smallest volcano in Japan. It’s just before you enter central Hagi. It was a small mountain, but a pretty nice park.
The Sea of Japan from the Kasayama observation deck
I have a feeling it’s going to be a great day.
Inside the schoolhouse (Shoka Sonjuku) at Shoin Shrine
This was the first place I went after arriving in Hagi. Shoin is a famous Japanese thinker. Here in the backwoods of Yamaguchi, he raised a generation of students on new-era ideas. He himself was executed at the age of 30 for resisting the shogunate, but the Meiji Restoration eventually succeeded at the hands of his students. If you look closely, quite a few of them are famous, but the one best known in Korea is probably Ito Hirobumi, who was killed by An Jung-geun. The people in this photo studied under Yoshida Shoin in this cramped room as boys, and later became heavyweights who laid the foundations of Japan’s political and business world. A film starring these men, “Choshu Five,” came out recently, too.
The house where Ito Hirobumi lived as a child
A shabby thatched-roof house. It seems to have been preserved just as it was back then.
Ito Hirobumi’s villa
It was originally in Tokyo, but when it was about to be torn down, Hagi City took over about a third of it and moved it here.
Inside
It’s cozy. A house with a small garden attached.
Inside 2
You can see photos of the Choshu Five. There was a volunteer stationed there.
The back path behind Shoin Shrine
It was great for a stroll. The most beautiful path I came across this summer.
I wandered around an area where the houses of Restoration activists are clustered together, like a Korean folk village.
I don’t know whose house this was, but it doesn’t seem to have been anyone very famous…
Flowers in the garden
A small, cozy garden. It seems to be the Japanese tradition to keep the garden in the back yard rather than the front.
Inside a room
In Korean terms, maybe something like the inner room of a yangban (aristocrat) house?
The well in front of the house
The volunteers seem to be looking after it well.
A slightly unusual garden
A back street in Hagi
Hagi is nice because the air of the Restoration is still intact, but it was hot and there weren’t many good places to rest. I kept thinking it would have been better to come in autumn. We rested in the shade at a nearby beach until about 3 o’clock before heading out, and it was still hot. It’s not a place with a wealth of things to see or eat, but it’s worth visiting at least once.