Most folks who go to Japan hit the same three stops. Tokyo, Kyoto, maybe Osaka if they've got an extra day. Nothing wrong with any of that, but tell you what, there's a whole island south of all that bustle that barely gets a mention in the guidebooks, and after reading about it I'm about ready to add it to my own bucket list. Travel Industry Today ran a piece recently on Kyushu, Japan's southern main island, and it sounds like my kind of place.

Kyushu is what you'd call the road-less-traveled version of Japan. Doesn't get the crowds the big-name spots do, and the pace slows down the farther south you go. The piece centers on Kagoshima Prefecture, down at the very southern tip, and if you've been reading my stuff a while you know I'm a sucker for the far end of a long drive. Kagoshima sits across a bay from Sakurajima, an active volcano, one of the most persistently active in the world by most accounts, that puffs away like it's got nowhere to be. That last detail is my own reading rather than something from the source, but it fits the picture the piece paints.

The headline attraction, though, is Yakushima Island. You might know it even if you don't think you do, because its ancient cedar forests were the inspiration for the enchanted woods in Princess Mononoke. And I mean ancient. Some of those cedar trees, the locals call them yakusugi, have been standing for thousands of years. Walking through that old moss-covered forest in the mountain mist is apparently less like a hike and more like stepping back before anybody kept records. The island is wet country, which is why everything grows thick and green and dripping. You don't get forests like that without weather that would send most of us running for the truck.

The whole prefecture has that lived-in feel you find in places that haven't been polished for tourists yet. Kind of like the difference between a state park with a gift shop at the gate and a gravel-road fishing hole only the locals know. The article calls Kyushu undiscovered, and I reckon that word gets thrown around loose in travel writing, but down at the southern tip of a southern island I believe it mostly earns it.

What catches my eye most about it, though, is the driving. Japan built these islands for it, or at least that's how it looks from here. Coastal roads, mountain passes, and a ferry ride out to a place like Yakushima that's half the experience itself. The article makes clear this is a region you want to take slow, the same way I keep telling folks to do Tuscany or the back roads of the Ozarks. Pull over. Get out. Stand under a tree older than most countries and let it humble you a little.

Have you been outside today? This time of year, when the maples start turning, I'd bet Yakushima is about as pretty as this planet gets. Autumn color on an island where the forest floor is carpeted in moss.

I've got my fall Ozarks run coming up, and I'd been half-dreaming about getting to Canada someday. Might have to pencil Japan's southern island onto that same list. A man only has so many falls left, and it'd be a shame to spend them all on the same roads, good as they are.