Sakurajima, the Volcano Next Door

From the centre of Kagoshima city you look across the water and there is a volcano. Not far away — about four kilometres. It is smoking. It smokes most days, and it has small eruptions hundreds of times a year.

People here live with it completely normally. Weather reports include the ash direction. Streets have yellow bags for collecting ash. Schools have hard hats. Nobody looks up.

The ferry

The ferry from Kagoshima port takes 15 minutes, costs 200 yen, and runs 24 hours a day, every day. You pay when you get off. There is a famous udon shop on board, and the ferry is short enough that eating a bowl in time is genuinely a small challenge.

What you can do on the island

You cannot climb it. Going near the summit is not allowed, for obvious reasons.

What you can do:

• Yunohira Observatory — the highest point visitors can reach, at 373 metres. From there you look straight up at the peak, and back across the bay at the city. This was the best view of the day.
• Nagisa foot bath — a free outdoor foot bath 100 metres long, right by the sea, heated by the volcano.
• Buried torii gate — after the great eruption of 1914, a shrine gate three metres tall was left with only the very top showing above the ash. It is still there, exactly as it was, and it is the clearest way to understand what happened.

There is a sightseeing bus that connects these stops for 500 yen, or a day pass for 700 yen.

The 1914 eruption

That eruption was the largest in Japan in the twentieth century. So much lava came out that it filled the channel on the eastern side and joined the island to the mainland permanently. Sakurajima is still called an island, but it has not been one for over a hundred years.

A small thing I liked

Sakurajima grows the largest radish in the world — sakurajima daikon — some weighing over 30 kilograms. It also grows the smallest mandarin orange in the world. Both from the same volcanic soil, on the same island. I bought a small bag of the oranges at the ferry terminal and ate them on the boat back.

Getting there

Fly or take the shinkansen to Kagoshima-Chuo, then a tram to the port. From Oita the train takes most of a day, so I flew from Oita airport instead — one hour.