Former coal town pinning hopes on historical assets to attract more tourists

Sept. 25, 2012

Former coal town pinning hopes on historical assets to attract more tourists

Iizuka, located in the central part of Fukuoka Prefecture, southwestern Japan, stages a series of autumn festivals demonstrating its prosperous days linked to the defunct Nagasaki Highway, but organizers this year are more serious than ever about attracting tourists as two stations had been built on the road exactly 400 years ago in the area.
The former Iizuka and Uchino stations, both in the current Iizuka City, were among the six stages established in the Chikuzen region as part of the highway in 1612 by the Kuroda clan, which ruled the area during the Edo era.
Iizuka was once the core city of the Chikuho coal field, but Japan’s energy revolution from the 1960s to 70s triggered shifts to cheap imported coal and oil, forcing the city to find a new means of life. Since then, tourism has been a key resource for the city to earn money.
The Uchino stage used to have an officially appointed hotel for the use of “daimyo” warlords, two inns for samurai and about 50 inns for ordinary travelers. The stage consisted of a 600-meter main street hemmed by the east and west gates and a branch street extending from a T-shaped junction in the middle of the main street. The old Iizuka stage was much larger, about twice as large as the Uchino stage, but the landscape in those days is better preserved in Uchino, said a staffer at an exhibition hall in Uchino. After the end of the Edo era, the Iizuka stage became a shopping area as Iizuka flourished with an influx of people related to the coal mining industry, while Uchino was left out of development after the Nagasaki Highway was deserted toward the end of the 19th century.
Nagasaki was at the western end of the 228-kilometer highway, which linked it to regions in the main island of Honshu through the northern part of Kyushu. Nagasaki is known as one of Japan’s two A-bombed cities, but it also has a history as the sole “window” open to the Western world in the years of the Tokugawa shogunate government’s isolation policy from the 17th century to the middle of the 19th century. The highway was also dubbed “the Sugar Road,” because various sweets and other imports spread from Nagasaki to the rest of Japan via the road. Items conveyed through the road were not limited to foods. Westerners traveled with many kinds of technology, books and documents from Nagasaki to Edo, currently Tokyo. A record says a Dutch emissary passed Uchino with an elephant as a gift to the Tokugawa shogun in Edo.
The highway had been partially paved with stones. “There used to be stone pavements at two places, but they were washed away with a flood which hit this town in 1953 when I was a high school student,” a local old man said.
Visitors can find a few preserved houses on the highway in Uchino. Nagasakiya Inn, which accommodated samurai travelers, is one of the preserved houses. The current building of the inn, which was built early in the Meiji era, is open to tourists, who can enjoy the same dishes as those served to travelers in the Edo era. Visitors should be recommended to try menus with “shiro-okowa” glutinous, white steamed rice, a local specialty, among other things.
The old man, who introduced himself as Mr. Ohba, formerly worked as a public employee. At present, he visits a local elementary school from time to time and talks about the history and culture of Uchino for pupils. When the Kuroda clan was ordered by the Tokugawa government to lay a road toward Nagasaki, the apparently easiest way was considered to be a route through the twin city of Fukuoka-Hakata, the home to the Lord of Kuroda. But this was not adopted and instead, the highway was built through a remote mountainous area so that Tokugawa spies may not infiltrate into the city, said the old man. It is unknown if this is true or not, but this kind of oral traditions is no doubt expected to make the time-honored town and the whole of Iizuka City more attractive to today’s travelers.