Cohorts of the Damned

Pulling myself together again to continue with the holiday snaps, after going down to Kagoshima it was then a trip up to the city of Kumamoto. Kumamoto's history is a comparatively modern one ('modern' in a rather academic sense anyway), with the area having very little prominence before the installation of Katō Kiyomasa as the local daimyō  in 1588, who ordered the construction of Kumamoto Castle and established the city as his administrative hub. Kiyomasa's son Tadahiro was deprived of his lands in 1632 and replaced by Hosokawa Tadatoshi, whose line continued to rule until the abolition of the domain system in 1871. Six years later, large parts of the city, and much of the castle, were burned or flooded during a nearly two-month siege by the Satsuma rebels, but the garrison held out until relief arrived. Kumamoto latterly served as a regional military headquarters and was hit by a major bombing raid in 1945, and in April 2016 it was also badly struck by a series of e...

The day after going to Nagasaki , we then headed down to the south of Kyūshū to the port city of Kagoshima, which to the uninitiated probably rings fewer bells than Nagasaki would, but it's a city that bears a remarkable number of similarities. It was also a key site in the early history of Japanese Christianity, an early centre of industrialisation, and a place of great significance to the broader Meiji Restoration period. For a quick rundown, Kagoshima was where the first Jesuit missionary to Japan, St Francis Xavier, landed in 1549. At this time it served as the seat of power for the Shimazu clan during the Sengoku era, and was then the capital of the Shimazu-ruled Satsuma Domain during the Edo period. In retaliation for Satsuma's implicit support of radical samurai assassins, the Royal Navy bombarded Kagoshima in August 1863, but paradoxically served to empower more pro-foreign elements in the domain government who established an informal alliance with Britain. After servin...

Taking a bit of a break from the painting table, last week I went on a bit of a trip round the western half of the island of Kyūshū, a rather appropriate getaway for someone who might be said to have an interest or two in the period of the Meiji Restoration. The day after arrival at Fukuoka saw a little trip down to Nagasaki, a city that probably needs little introduction. The trip takes about an hour and a half by train, with the first leg on a limited express line down to the town of Takeo in Saga Prefecture, where you then change onto a short Shinkansen route. Apparently plans have existed for some time to link Fukuoka directly to Nagasaki by Shinkansen, but the prefectural government in Saga has been unwilling to foot the bill for a rail line whose main purpose would, to be fair, to be to let travellers spend as little time in Saga as possible. While a little overcast, the predicted rain didn't come in until quite late in the day. On arrival I very quickly appreciated the city...