Yanagawa

Our boatman was seventy if he was a day, and he sang the entire way. Lia and I sat low in a long flat-bottomed punt called a donkobune, knees folded, gliding down a canal barely wider than the boat itself, while the old man stood in the stern working a single bamboo pole and delivering an unbroken stream of local ballads and dry jokes we only half understood. When we reached a bridge so low we had to duck flat against the boards, he ducked with us, still singing, and popped up the other side without dropping a note. I have taken grander boat rides in my life. I have never taken a happier one.

Poling Through the Old Moats

Yanagawa’s canals aren’t decorative — they are what’s left of the moat system of a castle that largely vanished, a web of waterways threaded right through the town. The donkobune cruises follow them for an hour or so, past back gardens and stone embankments and curtains of willow trailing in the water, under a whole series of little bridges each with its own name and story. Because you sit down at water level, the town reveals itself sideways: laundry lines, a cat on a wall, an old woman rinsing vegetables on stone steps that go straight down into the canal. In winter the boats even carry a small charcoal brazier, a kotatsu on the water, and you drift along toasting your knees. It is the gentlest possible way to see a place.

Steamed Sea-Bream and Eel

Yanagawa’s kitchen has one great dish, and it is worth timing your whole day around. Unagi seiro-mushi is eel — grilled, laid over rice that has been steamed in the eel’s own sweet sauce, then steamed again in a square lacquer box until every grain is glossy and fragrant, and finished with ribbons of thin omelette. We ate it in an old wooden restaurant near the water, the kind with tatami and sliding screens and a queue of locals out front, and it arrived almost too hot to touch. Rich, smoky, faintly sweet — Lia, who is suspicious of eel on principle, cleared her box entirely and then eyed mine. The town has been making it this way for centuries, and you can taste the practice.

Willows, Walls, and a Poet’s Ghost

After the boat we wandered on foot, which almost nobody seems to do, and found the better half of Yanagawa. The Ohana residence, once home to the lords of the town, keeps a beautiful landscape garden and a pond, and the back lanes still hold whitewashed storehouses and stretches of old moat wall softened by moss and willow. Yanagawa was also the home town of the poet Kitahara Hakushū, and there’s a real sense that the place has always known how to make quietness into art. We ended the afternoon on a bench by the water, watching another boatload of visitors glide past behind their singing captain, in no hurry at all to be anywhere else.

Getting There

Yanagawa sits in the south of Fukuoka Prefecture and is simplest to reach by the Nishitetsu train direct from Fukuoka’s Tenjin station, a run of around fifty minutes to an hour on the limited express. Combination tickets that bundle the train fare with a donkobune cruise are sold at the Nishitetsu counter and save both money and fuss. The boat docks and the town’s sights are a short walk or shuttle from the station. Pair it easily with Dazaifu on the same line for a full and unhurried day out of the city.