Thursday, 27 November 2025

Today was a brief sprint to the furthest south I will get in Japan this trip, the active stratovolcano Sakurajima near Kagoshima. I had many itinerary plans for Kagoshima, including trying to get tickets on the 36+3 luxury train, but in the end it ended up as a morning blast down there on a Shinkansen, visit the volcano via ferry, and then blast back to Hakata on a different model Shinkansen. It does mean I have ridden all three of Kyushu’s Shinkansen models. The volcano was an island in the bay until an eruption in 1914 connected it to the Osumi peninsula but the easiest way to get to it is by ferry across the bay.

First up this morning was a N700-7000 Shinkansen operating as a Mizuho service. This meant it left Osaka very early, made minimal stops, arrived on Kyushu at Hakata and then made only one more stop on it’s way to the end of the line at Kagoshima-Chuo.

N700-7000 Shinkansen

I discovered that a lot of the route south is through tunnels, or has screens beside the track so the window seat was a bit moot. Journey time 1 hour 16 minutes. When I measured it it was doing about 230km/h but even that was tricky as GPS satellites are not visible in tunnels under mountains.

A tram and a short walk got me to the ferry terminal, where you only pay at one end (the other one). At the other end I bought a day ticket for their tourist bus, which does an anti-clockwise loop around a portion of the former island, including going up to an “observatory” at 373 metres. Quite a way from the top but probably safer that way. Of course this stop was close to the end of the loop but I wasn’t taking chances with the weather and so I did that first.

view of the volcano from the ferry port at Kagoshima

This is the view from the ferry on the Kagoshima side. There are two volcanoes and the one on the right (with its personal cloud) is the active one.

Here are some images from the observatory, really a platform for tourists as the real observatory is further up the volcano.

where are we?

overall picture

jagged peaks

some sort of mitigation for landslides

The observatory also had some nice views back to Kagoshima.

bright sunshine can be a curse, this is nicer

and then the clouds do this

The “island” is known for a small and sweet orange “sakurajima komikan” and they are really tiny.

tiny oranges

All around the island there are eruption shelters, some large, some small.

eruption shelter

a smaller one

and there’s these confidence boosting signs

where to run

Believe it or not this is a river

a river

As I was returning to the port the volcano looked a little grumpy.

I’m sure everything is fine

Anyway it was getting dark and so time to go so I reversed course back to the port, paid for the ferry ride before taking it, walked back to the tram stop and took it to the station where a Shinkansen 800 was waiting to take me back to Hakata. This is an all stops service so it took 1 hour 45 minutes to get back to Hakata.

Shinkansen 800

I’ve got a morning here in Hakata before a N700S Nozumi service takes me to Tokyo in 4 hours 57 minutes.