Shingu, Fukuoka

The ferry to Aishima leaves from a small harbor, and the island it reaches is known as much for its cats as for its fishing. Offshore in the Genkai Sea, Aishima once served as a port of call for Korean diplomatic missions — a detail the island carries quietly, alongside its stone-mound tombs and the smell of salt air. Back on the mainland, Shingu-cho sits between that coastline and the forested slope of Tachiyama, a mountain whose summit holds the ruins of Tachibana Castle, stone walls still visible among the trees.

Two train lines reach the town from different directions. Nishitetsu Shingu Station, the terminus of the Kaizuka Line, opened in 1925 and still anchors the older part of town. Shingu-Chuo Station, opened more recently, is surrounded by large commercial facilities — including the first IKEA in Kyushu — and the surrounding streets have the unfinished quality of a neighborhood still finding its shape. Young families have moved here in numbers, drawn by proximity to Fukuoka city, and the proportion of children in the population is among the highest in the country.

Yet older layers remain close to the surface. The Yokooji family residence, a thatched-roof farmhouse from the seventeenth century designated as an Important Cultural Property, stands as one of the oldest surviving structures in Kyushu. On the slopes of Tachiyama, a grove of camphor trees — some more than three hundred years old — forms a Special Natural Monument. Dokko-ji temple at the mountain's base traces its founding to the priest Saicho. Shingu strawberries grow somewhere between all of this: the suburban and the ancient, the harbor and the hillside.