Featuring some of Japan's best seafood and a plethora of spectacular sights nearby, this little-known city could have rivaled Hiroshima as West Japan's premier tourist destination -- if only it were located on the Shinkansen route.
To the Japanese themselves remote Matsue evokes many images. To photographers it boasts the nation's most dramatic sunset. To history bluffs, one of Japan's most majestic castles with a Samurai quarter built along its moat. To foodies, Matsuba-gani snow crabs and time-honoured Wagashi sweets. To others, gateway to the world's top Japanese garden and the nation's second most important shrine.
Impressive isn't it? But Matsue is located on the secluded San'in Coast, nowhere near a Shinkansen and thus largely ignored by international tourists shuttling between iconic Kyoto and Hiroshima. Over 3 nights in town we saw less than 10 foreigners, which was night-and-day compared with our previous homebase of Kurashiki, let alone Kyoto in the popular autumn season.
In fact foreigners were so preciously few that numerous discounts were offered to anyone producing a non-Japanese passport, from half-price entry to the castle to 30% off sunset cruises to a staggering 1150 yen discount for the gorgeous Adachi Museum. The local government was desperate to put San'in on the international traveler's radar.
But the absolute best deal was JR's San'in Okayama Area Pass, the cheapest JR Pass anywhere in Japan at a ridiculous 1125 yen (CAD$13) per day for 4 days, including Express Train privileges! Showing my pass to a local resident on the final day made his eyes green with envy -- I must have racked up 13000 yen's worth of train rides with it.
It all started on Day 5 of our 16-Day Circle Route when we activated our pass at Kurashiki, stopped by Bitchu-Takahashi's mountaintop castle and arrived in the late afternoon at Matsue, a sprawling city of bridges, winding castle moats and one of the smallest populations among Japan's 47 prefecture capitals. This would serve as our homebase for the next three nights as we day-tripped to Kurayoshi, Adachi Museum and Izumo Taisha.
The next morning we started exploring Matsue and its imposing 400-year-old stronghold, surrounded by a willow-swept moat now entrusted with holding back onslaughts from legions of elementary school students on field trips. The 5-storey citadel was much larger and more sophisticated compared with Bitchu-Matsuyama, though not quite as extravagant as World Heritage Himeji, the ultimate benchmark of all Japanese castles.
Once the seat of the local Daimyo during the Edo Period, Matsue Castle still affords a sweeping panorama of the former feudal domain from Lake Shinji to the west, tracing the Ohashi River and leading into the inner sea of Nakaumi in the east. Most popular among visitors was the southerly view towards the enigmatic island of Yomegashima, Matsue's most recognizable landmark after the castle.
After the castle we continued north, passing the red Torii gates of Jozan Inari Shrine and crossing the moat to Shiomi Nawate, formerly a neighborhood of mid-class Samurai and now home to several small museums and traditional Soba restaurants. Compared with the brilliant red maples at Bitchu-Takahashi the previous day, branches were already bare in mid November here on the wintry San'in Coast.
A key attraction at Shiomi Nawate was the little Machiya of Matsue's favorite adopted son, writer Lafcadio Hearn who married into a prominent local clan in the 1890s and published several influential books on Japanese culture. Between Hearn's house and memorial museum, the nearby Samurai Residence and the 18th Century teahouse of Meimei-An, this 500m stretch of the castle moat was quite enough for a busy morning's sightseeing.
One of our highlights at Matsue was an excellent lunch of Ramen in Flying Fish Broth at the locally renowned Menya Hibari (see next post for details). After a lazy afternoon break at our rental apartment, we paid a visit to the Shimane Art Museum searching for its crowd favorite bunnies, without realizing that we could have done this for free as they were installed as a free exhibit outside of the museum!
Like the majority of Japanese visitors, we visited the museum not for its exhibits but for its strategic location on the shoreline, a front-row seat to one of Japan's most famous sunsets. The shallow brackish waters of Lake Shinji nurture some of West Japan's best seafood year round, as this blue heron would concur.
What makes the Lake Shinji sunset special to the Japanese is the silhouette of the revered Yomegashima, an uninhabited sanctuary of a few pine trees, stone Jizo statues and a Torii gate. The island was off-limit during our visit, and generally would be aside from several days a year when the locals would tie a long rope between the shore and the island for a bizarre hike through the 1.4 m deep water.
I took this picture amidst several hundred Japanese who amassed along the shoreline despite the frigid temperature -- and this likely happens every day of the year. As the sun descended upon the horizon, latecomers made their mad dash towards the designated sunset-watching spot, 400m south of the Art Museum. Mother nature did not disappoint on this day.
While we did take Matsue's local buses a couple times, most of these attractions were within walking distance from our rental apartment, 5 minutes west of the train station. It was your prototypical pint-sized Japanese flat with a 6-jo Tatami room, a living/dining area, kitchen and bathroom crammed into 25 square metres of space.
Our first ever experience with Airbnb turned out slightly disappointing due to the lack of cleanliness in our apartment, which I find rare in Japan compared with most other countries. While track noise was an issue as disclosed by the landlord, it was manageable as trains stopped running before midnight and were quite infrequent in the early morning.
While the kitchen was quite functional with an induction stove top and the Japanese essential of rice cooker, the owner failed to clean out the residual garbage from the previous tenant. On the positive side, I ended up learning the local rules for garbage disposal and recycling.
The one truly indispensable feature turned out to be the Japanese combo of washer-dryer, a life-saver for any independent traveler on a long cross-country journey. Japanese coin laundry shops are NOT cheap, and we're quite thankful for the washing machines in this apartment as well as at our next homebase of Yunotsu.
One of our favorite pastimes in Matsue was to sample its nationally-famous tradition of Wagashi sweets, pictured here with seasonal offerings from two of the city's revered confectioneries, the 200-year-old Keigetsudo and the 140-year-old Saiundo. To understand its appeal one needs to look no further than the orange-coloured Yuzugomoro, a truly meticulous piece of artwork in which a whole Yuzu citrus had to be candied, hand-scraped clean and refilled with a jelly of sweet Azuki beans ... and available at a peasant-friendly price of 280 yen!
While the candied Yuzu would traditionally be accompanied by strong Matcha, it also went exceptionally well with the local dessert wine of Kumo no Yuzuzake, a sweet concoction of Yuzu citrus from nearby Izumo. That's just a foretaste of local flavors at this fascinating corner of Japan -- the restaurants reviews are coming, in the next two articles.
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