While I had thought that my first trip back to Japan would be made to Shizuoka, it ended up being Kyushu. My friend Sean had long wanted us to travel there together, and when we found out that a chunk of our time off for the Korean spring break coincided, we jumped on the opportunity. Rather than a plane, we instead took the JR Beetle, a jet foil ferry running between Busan and Fukuoka. The ride was only three hours, port to port.
Sean had never been to Japan, so in a way I felt able to see it all for the first time again, vicariously recapturing some of the experiences and feelings I had back in 2008 when I first set foot there. I planned for us to go directly from Fukuoka to Nagasaki, from Nagasaki to Saga, and then return to Fukuoka for the last days of our trip. Though I had been to both Fukuoka and Nagasaki before, it sometimes felt like an entirely new experience and at other times was tinged with nostalgia and stark recollections.
Our short trip was great from start to finish, with many highlights. Without realising it, I had booked us spots at the same hostel in Nagasaki (International Youth Hostel AKARI) that I had stayed in on my first trip there. It was impossible not to recall it as we disembarked from one of the city's signature trams and walked into the old part of the city, where stone arched bridges still span the river and the ground rises gently toward a nearby four hundred year-old temple that survived the 1945 atomic bombing.
