Living on the Edge
the curious lure of volcanoes

THERE’S NOTHING LIKE a little taste of danger-even if it's only imaginary—to pep up an otherwise humdrum life and most countries that harbor volcanoes are only too eager to trade on their existence. In Japan and Hawaii, to name but two. Volcanoes arc big business and it doesn't hurt that they are located mostly in picturesque areas. (Mexico's Popocatepetyl and Iztaccihuatl are relative also-rans, doing little to entice visitors).

Japan's Sakurajima, on the island just across the bay from Kagoshima promotes itself as "the town where you can see the earth on fire”. Its lava-rich soil produces the world's largest daikons (radishes) and the world's smallest oranges, satsuma named after the clan which ruled over this region for centuries. Satsuma. on sale in the local museum, is also the name for the sumptuously carved colored glassware, created here for centuries on the southern-most island of Kyushu and on sale in the local museum. An oft-told story about the Sakurajima volcano may be apocryphal but it's the sort of tale everybody seems to want to believe. In the local police station, it's reported. is a row of shoes—macabre reminders of those sad suicides who, in traditional Japanese fashion, removed them before plunging into the crater.

THE ISLAND'S comfortable youth hostel, 15 minutes' walk from the 24-hour ferry, is about half the price of the cheapest inns but the best new of the volcano is from the Iso garden on the mainland where in 1736 the first bamboo from China was planted near a stream beside which poem-writing parties were held. Lords and ladies sipped sake as they created verses on slips of paper which were then floated in the river. Did their courtiers downstream benefit from this charming aesthetic experience?

Apart from a few hikers, and potential suicides, Sakurajima is for looking, whereas 5,000 ft. Mount Aso near Kumamoto in the north is for visiting. The whole valley is actually a giant caldera, 14 miles long by 12 miles wide, created 50,000 years ago and so huge that 80,000 live there today. Mount Aso’s crater, 500 feet deep, is the largest of any active volcano in the world. Because the constantly smoking volcano whose highest peaks are Nakodake and Takodake the region is known as Hi no Kuni, (“the country of fire”). Along Route 57 between Kumamoto and the mountain 50,000 azalea trees are in full bloom from late April to early May.

Designated a national park in 1925, Mt. Aso gets 5-1/2 million visitors each year. It is eerie at the crater’s rim, a pocked landscape like pictures of the moon’s surface always filled with tourists taking pictures of each other against a permanently smoking background. Small stones come flying up from the interior so frequently that sturdy concrete huts have been built in which people can take shelter when the barrage becomes especially heavy. Those energetic enough to arrive before sunrise are rewarded with views of what’s known as the Aso Cloud Sea ­ the ground fog like a sea of shining cotton caused by hotter air atop the volcano pressing on that of the valley.

Access is from the nearest station, Aso is on the Main Line, from which buses run to the peak up the Bochu Route, popular with hikers. Near Miyaji, two stations to the east, is the Aso Shrine, legendarily built over 2,000 years ago to worship the gods protecting the mountain by the emperor Jimmu’s grandson. From the southern side another climbing route, the Yoshida, starts from Hakusa village on the Minami Aso Railway, and passes the slab-like Aso Volcanic Museum in which visitors can watch pictures transmitted live from the cameras set up in the crater to monitor volcanic activity.

Spectacular as the volcano is, it is upstaged once a year on a night in late March when the fields on and around the mountain are set on fire to exterminate cattle ticks and produce better pasture land. Carefully controlled with manned firebreaks, it is the occasion for rowdy celebrations in all the surrounding villages from which the sign of the blazing mountain is unforgettable. Kumamoto Castle, dating back to 1601 with 49 turrets and 29 gates took seven years to build, and is now a museum. Here Japan’s most famous rebel, a local samarai named Takamori Saigo, held out against government forces for two months before committing seppaku. Across town, the house in which Lafcadio Hearn, Dutch-born writer who lived with his Japanese wife until his death in 1904, has become a literary shrine. He taught at the city’s university, tried to explain his adopted land in a dozen books including Japan: An Attempt at Interpretation and claimed that the “wonder and delight” with which the country filled him had never faded. “How refuse to be charmed by a civilization in which every relation appears to be governed by altruism, every action directed by duty and every object shaped by art?” he asked rhetorically. “You cannot help being delightd by such conditions”.

On Mt. Kimpo, to the northwest among bamboo and orange groves is Reigando, the cave temple to which the famous 17th century swordsman Musashi Miyamoto (1584-1644), the father of martial art, retired in his 50th year to write the Book of Five Rings (Earth, Water, Fire, Wind, Air) a philosophical treatise that even today is revered by certain businessmen who regard themselves as warriors and find virtually irresistible the promise that “when you have attained the way of strategy there will not be one thing you cannot understand”. Musashi counseled that “you should (remain) determined, though calm. Meet the situation without tenseness, yet not recklessly. Your spirit settled, yet unbiased… Do not let the enemy see your spirit”. A collection of Musashi’s swords and writings are exhibited in Kumamoto’s Shimada museum.