Kumamoto

The 2016 earthquake hit Kumamoto in two waves fourteen hours apart, which is an unusual kind of cruelty — the first enough to send people into the streets, the second arriving as they stood outside thinking the worst was over. It damaged or destroyed more than forty thousand buildings and left the city’s great castle, one of Japan’s most celebrated historical fortresses, with cracked stone walls, collapsed towers, and rubble that took months to clear. When I visited several years later, the restoration was ongoing, scaffolding still wrapping sections of the main keep, workers in hard hats visible through the cherry trees.

And yet the castle — even in partial ruin — remained the most commanding thing in the city. The stone walls at the base are curved in a technique called musha-gaeshi, designed to curve inward as they rise so that attacking samurai would lose their footing, and even broken in places these walls retain an authority that speaks to the engineering intelligence behind them. Kumamoto Castle was built by the warlord Kato Kiyomasa in 1607, and Kiyomasa was obsessive about military architecture in a way that left traces visible at every angle: the roofline profiles are deceptive, the angles calculated for psychological effect as much as structural efficiency. I spent two hours walking the grounds, watching how the castle shifted in appearance from different positions, how the main tenshu tower seemed to float above the stone platforms when seen from the south garden at a particular time of afternoon.

The city itself moves with an energy that surprised me — not the frenetic pace of Fukuoka or the tourist-polished calm of somewhere like Kyoto, but something more businesslike, a regional capital that has things to do and is getting on with them. The covered arcade near the castle, Shimotori, stretches for several blocks and contains the mix of shops and restaurants that Japanese arcades always do, and somewhere near its middle I found myself eating karashi renkon at a counter restaurant: lotus root stuffed with a paste of mustard and miso, fried in batter until golden, cross-sectioned to show the repeating chambers of the root in yellow. It is the kind of food that only exists because a specific place developed a specific set of ingredients and several hundred years ago someone creative was standing in the kitchen.

The basashi — raw horse sashimi — deserves more than the alarm it provokes at first mention. I ordered it at a restaurant near the castle that had been serving it for three generations. The meat arrived sliced thin and very cold, pale pink with a fine marble of fat, served with ginger and soy and the recommendation to eat it in one piece. The flavor was clean and slightly sweet, closer to venison than beef, with a delicacy that the temperature seemed to amplify. Kumamoto has been eating horse this way since the feudal period, when cavalry horses that could no longer be used in war found a different kind of purpose.

The Suizenji Garden, a few kilometers from the castle, miniaturizes the landscape between Kyoto and Edo in a single park — hills that represent Mount Fuji, a pond meant to suggest Lake Biwa, lawn paths through what the Edo-period planners imagined as the essential shape of Japan. It is a strange and beautiful conceit, and on a weekday morning it is very quiet.

When to go: Late March to early April for the castle’s cherry blossom combination — the Kumamoto Castle cherry blossoms are among Kyushu’s finest. Autumn is pleasant and the castle grounds turn gold. The restoration work will continue for years; check current access levels before planning which sections are open.