Yanagawa

Yanagawa is an hour south of Fukuoka by train, in the flat agricultural delta where the Chikugo River spreads toward Ariake Bay, and its defining feature is immediately visible from the bridges: the canals. The city built them centuries ago as defensive moats around its castle, and when the castle was demolished the waterways stayed, threading through the old merchant district and out into the residential neighborhoods in a network that you navigate by flat-bottomed boat rather than by road if you are doing it correctly. The boats are called donko-bune, and the boatmen stand at the stern and push long bamboo poles against the shallow canal bottom with a rhythm that is, somehow, exactly as relaxing to watch as everyone who has ever described it claims it is.

I got onto a boat at the main embarkation point near Ohana garden and spent the next hour and a half watching the city from two feet above the water level. The canals are narrow enough in places that the willow branches trail in the water on both sides simultaneously, the boat passing through them with a soft brushing sound. The stone walls beside the waterway carry their age with the particular dignity of things that were built to last and have — the mortar between the stones stained green, the coping stones worn smooth where generations of children have sat and watched the boats come through. In spring the cherry trees along the banks make the whole thing look like something designed by someone with a very specific sense of the picturesque. In late autumn, when I came, the gingko trees had dropped their leaves into the water and the canal surface was covered in yellow, the boat’s passage through them making slow eddies.

The boatman, a man who appeared to be in his late sixties with a straw hat worn regardless of weather, sang a song for about three minutes somewhere near the middle of the route. I didn’t understand the words. The other passengers — a family from Osaka, an older couple from somewhere else in Fukuoka Prefecture — listened with the attentiveness that Japanese audiences bring to being sung to, which is to say total and unself-conscious. The song was something about the river, I think, or the seasons, or the nature of traveling by water. The boatman finished, resumed pushing the pole, and said nothing else for the remainder of the journey.

Yanagawa’s other insistence is unaju: eel grilled over charcoal, lacquered with a sweet soy-mirin tare, served over rice in a lacquered box. This particular style of eel is a Yanagawa specialty, and the best version I had came from a restaurant near the main canal that had been serving it since what their sign suggested was the Meiji era. The eel was ordered and then a long time passed — perhaps forty-five minutes — during which the owner brought hot barley tea and small pickles and I sat at a low table looking out over the canal. The eel arrived in a black lacquer box, the glaze so thick it had caramelized in places, the eel beneath it soft in a way that required almost no chewing, the rice beneath that having absorbed the dripping fat and sauce into something that tasted like the memory of all the grilled eel you had ever eaten.

Ohana garden, the strolling garden of the Tachibana clan who governed Yanagawa for centuries, has a Western-style wing that the nineteenth century Tachibana lords built to display their modernity and which now shows how thoroughly strange it was to build an English country house beside a Japanese feudal garden. Walking between the two structures in an afternoon takes about four minutes and requires a significant mental gear change.

When to go: March and April for cherry blossoms along the canal banks — genuinely among the most beautiful in Fukuoka Prefecture. Late November for gingko gold. The canals are pleasant year-round; summer is humid but the willows provide shade and the water stays cool beside the boats. Skip Obon week in mid-August if you want space on the boats.