Kyushu, an easy few days

I'd start gently, in Fukuoka, and slip out to Dazaifu in the afternoon. Dazaifu Tenmangu is one of the most loved shrines in all Japan, and it's worth understanding why before you go: it's built over the grave of a brilliant scholar who was wrongly exiled here a thousand years ago, and who became Tenjin, the deity of learning — so the people walking the approach beside you are very often students and parents, come to pray before an exam. There's a tenderness to that you can feel. The kind thing here is small and easy: walk the approach softly, touch the bronze ox if you like (people stroke it for wisdom), and let the ema prayer-plaques be — they hold real hopes. Then back to Fukuoka for the evening, where the city's open-air food stalls open under their cloth curtains and strangers end up shoulder to shoulder, and that warmth is its own kind of welcome.

Today you slip west to a city unlike anywhere else in Japan. For more than two centuries, while the country kept itself closed, Nagasaki held the single window left open — a tiny fan-shaped Dutch trading post called Dejima, and a Chinese quarter beside it — so the place grew up mixing Japanese, Chinese and European influences into something all its own, a blend the locals still call wa-ka-ran. You taste it in champon noodles, you see it in the hillside churches, and you feel its other, heavier history in the Peace Park, where a quiet falls over everyone. I'd give the city a full day and stay for the night view from Mount Inasa — the lights pooling in the harbour valley have long been counted among Japan's celebrated night views, and they're the reason Nagasaki rewards an overnight. It's a westward step off the southbound spine, and worth every minute of the doubling back.

Today the island turns south, and the Shinkansen makes short work of it — though first you relay back from Nagasaki to pick up the southbound line. The stop is Kumamoto, for its castle: counted among Japan's three great fortresses, and carrying a tender, recent story. The 2016 earthquakes badly damaged it, and the long, public repair has become something the whole city watches over together — the great keep has reopened to visitors while work on the curving stone walls goes on, scaffolding and all. There's something quietly moving about a castle being healed in plain sight. From Kumamoto, the Hohi Line climbs east into the mountains to Mt Aso, where you can stand inside one of the world's largest calderas — a vast green bowl with a living, steaming volcano at its heart. One honest note for Aso: the crater is an active volcano, and the rim closes when the alert level rises or the gas runs high — so I'd treat standing at the edge as a bonus, not a promise, and check the morning's status before heading up.

The spine ends in the deep south, in Kagoshima — a warm, open city that lives in the shadow of a volcano. Sakurajima smokes across the bay, close enough that ash sometimes dusts the streets, and the people here have simply made their peace with it: a ferry runs out to the volcano around the clock, famously sweet little vegetables grow in its ash, and there's a southern ease to the place that feels a world away from Fukuoka up north. I'd cross to Sakurajima itself to feel how ordinary a live volcano can become to the people who live beside it, then let the warm city carry the rest of the day. It's a fitting close to a journey down the island — from a shrine of hope in the north to a mountain of fire in the south.