Kagoshima City

Kagoshima is one of my top five favorite places in Japan. The sweet potato shōchū, its proud history, the relaxing hot springs, the food (pork-heavy) that’s umaka, the beautiful women, of whom my wife is one, and the volcano Sakurajima all make the prefecture worth visiting.

Sakurajima (lit. “Cherry Blossom Island”), a strato-or conical volcano located just across Kinkō Wan (bay), is considered Japan’s most active volcano, with 20 small eruptions occurring every month.

The volcano is featured in the city’s manhole design, along with the slightly odd slogan “Magma City”. Above the volcano, it says “Anata to wakuwaku . . . “ (Excited with you . . .)

Volcanic ash is everywhere.

We had a similar problem in Portland back in the 80s when Mount St. Helen’s blew her top.

Volcanic ash collection site. The ash is sometimes used in reclamation projects.

The manhole covers for the sewage feature a kiriko design. Satsuma kiriko is a type of cut glass craft that was manufactured by the Satsuma Clan from late Edo to early Meiji, so from the mid to late 1800s.

This manhole features the crest of the Shimazu family which ruled Satsuma during the Edo Period.

A fairly common fire cistern.

Nagoya City

Commemorating the 100th anniversary of the city, the manhole features the Hori River and Naya Bashi (納屋橋).

100 周年を記念して、名古屋市の中心部を流れる堀川と広小路通が交差する「納屋橋」

This looks awfully similar to Fukuoka City’s manhole design. Clearly someone was influenced by someone else.

The older manhole covers feature an amenbo or "Water skipper" (gerridae).

Inuyama, Aichi

Had I known that Inuyama’s Castle was one of only 12 authentic Japanese castles remaining in Japan today—the rest were destroyed after the fall of the Shogunate, I would have tried to visit it. Instead I went to Meiji Mura, an open-air architectural museum for preserving and exhibiting buildings from the Meiji (1867–1912) and Taishō (1913–1926) eras, including the main entrance and lobby of Tokyo's old Imperial Hotel, designed by Frank Lloyd Wright and built in 1923.

Wiki: Inuyama Castle is located on a hill overlooking the Kiso River in what is now the city of Inuyama. Inuyama Castle is often claimed without any historical justification as the "oldest castle in Japan"; however, Inuyama Castle is one of 12 castles to have retained its Edo Period donjon (Tenshukaku) intact. This main tower is small but due to its complex form, it shows different silhouettes depend on the angle. Among the 12 remaining main towers, the donjon at Inuyama Castle is designated as a National Treasure of Japan, as are Matsumoto Castle, Hikone Castle and Himeji Castle.

Iizuka, Fukuoka

With some 126,000 people, exactly 1/1000th Japan’s population, Iizuka is Fukuoka Prefecture’s fourth largest city. Nevertheless, it is a quiet town today with an aging and declining population. Back in its postwar heyday, it was the heart of a coal-mining industry that was located throughout the Chikuhō District. When the coal mines closed down in the ‘70s due to cheaper imports, Iizuka, like most towns in the area, lost its mojo.

Fukuoka City

Of all the manhole covers I have come across over the past few years, Fukuoka City's has got to have one of the most abstract, Bauhausian designs. I have looked at it a thousand times and still don't get it.

 According to the city's website, the public was invited in 1990 to design a manhole cover to commemorate the city's sewage system reaching one million customers. (The things people celebrate!) The theme of the competition was "An Unconventional Design Suitable to the City which Also Improves the Image of the Sewage System". (Sheesh, what a mouthful. They should have first held a competition to come up with a better theme.)† 

Some 735 submissions came in from around the country. While many of the designs featured abstact depictions of birds, sailboats, and views of the city, the winning design was chosen for the active impression it gave of the city and her people. (Really? It gives me the impression that the city is an industrial powerhouse, which it is not and never has been.)

The new manholes began replacing the old ones from April 1991.

Smaller cover marking a "confluence" of pipes features camelias, the official flower of the city, and Fukuoka's three diamond symbol in the center.

Saibu Gas (西部ガス) manhole cover.

Not sure what this is for, but it has the city's symbol in the center. The Symbol is made up of 9 or “ku” katakana フ, which read backwards is “FU-KU” as in FU-KU-oka.

An older manhole cover for an embedded fire hydrant found in Maizuru Park.

A newer design for the fire hydrant.

   Yet another manhole cover for a “fire plug” or hydrant.

I wonder if this one can even be opened anymore.

In recent years, these cheap looking plastic manhole covers can be seen around town, usually near places of interest. So, on your way from Tōjin Machi Station to the dome, you can find designs related to the Softbank Hawks. Similarly, from Yakuin to the zoo, you can find manholes that feature different zoo animals.

Shizuoka City

Shizuoka, capital of the prefecture of the same name in Japan's Chûbu region, is a city of about seven hundred thousand people. Famous today for its green tea and view of Mt. Fuji, Shizuoka was home to Tokugawa Ieyasu, the founder and first shogun of the Tokugawa shogunate of Japan, which ruled from the Battle of Sekigahara in 1600 until the Meiji Restoration in 1868.

The tachiaoi (たちあおい) pictured in the two pictures (above and below) is the city's official flower (Alcea rosea, hollyhock) and was incorporated in the family crest (家紋, kamon) of the Tokugawa Clan.

Both of these photos (above and below) are of the covers to fire hydrants (消火栓, shôkasen) that have been embedded into the ground.

This cover also features the common kingfisher, the city’s official bird.

Saga City

Saga City’s manhole features the venerable mutsugorô (mudskipper), an amphibious fish that can use its pectoral fins to walk on land.

Saga City, Sewage

Saga City, Gas

Saga is one of those prefectures that not many people outside of the region know anything about. I used to joke that Saga was little more than the prefecture you had to drive through to get to Nagasaki, but in all fairness, the quiet prefecture has a lot of charm and quite a few places that are worth visiting. Takeo, a town famous for its hot spring, is rather nice. My favorite Japanese architect, Kingo Tatsuno, designed the gate and building housing the main public bath in the town. Karatsu to the north is also a town with a lot to see. Then there are the ceramic centers of Imari, Hasami, and Arita. So, while Saga City is not the most inspiring of towns, the prefecture itself has a lot going for it.

Yame, Fukuoka

For a city that has so much that distinguishes it from other towns in the prefecture—namely, Yamé cha (tea) and Yamé ningyō (dolls)—they sure did choose a boring manhole design. What is the message they are trying to convey? That the sun never sets in this city? Well, I'm sorry to say, the sun did in fact set on this sleepy town a very long time ago. The origin of the town’s name Yamé (八女, lit. “8 woman”) comes from the Nihon Shoki (日本書紀, also known as The Chronicles of Japan), the second oldest book of classical Japanese history, which claimed that a goddess named Yame Tsuhime (八女津姫) lived in the region.  For more on Yamé, go here.

Ise City, Mie Prefecture

Ise City (伊勢市) is located in eastern Mie Prefecture, on the island of Honshū about two hours to the east of Ōsaka by train. Home to Ise Grand Shrine, the most sacred and famous Shintō shrine in Japan, it is a popular destination for tourists and pilgrims in spite of its inconvenient location.

Pictured on Ise City's manhole is Okage Mairi. During the Edo Period (1603–1868) it was popular for large groups of pilgrims to travel to Mie and every sixty years millions of pilgrims would decend upon Ise during what was known as the Okage Toshi (Okage Year). Also called nukemairi (抜け参り), servants and children would travel to the shrine without their master's or parent's permission, often having to rely on mendicancy along the way. 

At the time, the trip from Edo (modern-day Tōkyō) could take as long as fifteen days, while from Ōsaka it took 5 days and from Nagoya three.

Saiki City, Oita

Saiki City (佐伯市) is a small town with about 66,766 inhabitants (2020), located on the eastern coast of Ōita Prefecture.

The city was a jōka-machi, or castle town in the Edo Period (1603~1868), the first half of which experienced a sudden rise in urban centers built around the castles of the Daimyō, or vassals of the Shōgun. Numbering between 200 and 250 for most of this period, the Daimyō were allowed by the shogunate (幕府, bakufu) to erect one castle in their feudal domain (藩, han). Because of this castles were (but not always) torn down throughout the domain and the samurai class in each han moved to neighborhoods near the castle. Many of these neighborhoods with their old samurai residences, called buke yashiki (武家屋敷), can still be found fairly well-preserved in smaller Japanese towns today. 

Saiki's manhole cover also features the gate of the former castle. Like many Japanese castles it was torn down (abandoned?) in 1871 in an effort to destroy the vestiges of the old feudal system. (Mottainai! Such a waste!)

The writing on the manhole says Saiki no haru mazu Shiroyama ni kitari doppo (佐伯の春まず城山に来たり独歩) or roughly translated "Saiki's spring first comes to Shiroyama and walks alone." (Shiroyama is the hill upon which the castle was located.) The sentence comes from the novel Bungo no Kuni, Saiki (豊後の国佐伯).

Tsukumi City, Oita

Tsukumi City (津久見市, pop. 15,815 as of 2020) is a small city in the southwest of Ōita Prefecture. 

Besides having produced a number of champion high school baseball teams and professional athletes—hence the manhole design—Tsukumi is famous for Ōtomo Sōrin (1530 – June 11, 1587), a Japanese feudal lord of the Ōtomo clan and one of the few lords to convert to Christianity. He met personally with Francis Xavier in 1551 and forged an alliance with the Portuguese that culminated in the Siege of Moji ten years later. Ōtomo was also responsible for sending the first official embassy to Europe, known as the Tenshō Embassy, to have audiences with Pope Gregory XIII (the Pope after whom the Gregorian calendar is named) and European kings. Interesting stuff from an otherwise sleepy port town.

Ōtomo Sōrin (大友 宗麟, January 31, 1530 – June 11, 1587), also known as Fujiwara no Yoshishige (藤原 義鎮) and Ōtomo Yoshishige (大友 義鎮)

Yokosuka, Kanagawa

As far as I know, Yokosuka City in Kanagawa Prefecture is the only city in Japan that has a manhole design featuring a gaijin. The foreigner in this case is Commodore Matthew Perry, the American naval commander who played a important role in forcing Japan out of its policy of isolation when he sailed into Uraga Harbor on 14 July 1853. The ship depicted in the background of the manhole is one of the four coal-fired "black ships", or kurobune. These were ships of western origin that started appearing menacingly in Japanese waters in the 19th century.

This is another more common design for Yokosuka's manholes. The star in the center is the city's seal and the flower is the city's official flower, the hamayū (ハマユウ) or Crinum asiaticum (also called Poison Bulb, Grand Crinium Lilium).

An underground fire hydrant.

Another fire hydrant. Fairly standard design, this one.

An air valve, whatever that is. I do like the color, though.

The Commodore, himself.

The Japanese Battleship Mikasa.

I traveled down to Yokosuka for two reasons. The first was, one, to see the battleship, which is the last remaining example of a “pre-dreadnought” battleship. It was launched in 1900, commissioned in 1902 and served as the flagship throughout the Russo-Japanese War of 1904-1905. The was restored in the 1950s after years of neglect.

The second reason I visited the city was to get a feel of the place where my father was stationed with the Marines back in the early 1950s.

Mifune, Kumamoto

Mifune Town (御舟町) is located in the center of Kumamoto prefecture in the Kamimashiki district/county (上益城郡). The town has a population of only 17,888 people as of this writing. (No telling how many kappa--the green river imp playing the drums--there are, though.)

The biggest event in the town is the Mifune Gahppa Festival (御船があーっぱ祭り) held in August, the symbol of which is a statue of kappa called Funatarô.

Also of interest in the town is the Mifune Dinosaur Musuem. An alternative design of Mifune's manhole covers feature a dinosaur named Funeppi.

More on Mifune Town here.

Mikazuki Machi