This perspective is fully experienced by passengers who opt to take the switchback train from Kumamoto City to the unassuming little town of Aso, one of the best ways to approach the region.

The town, situated within Aso-Kuju National Park, is little more than a base for renting cars, finding accommodation and checking on bus times to the caldera. There are a few restaurants here, though, as well as a hot spring public bath or two. However, it is the Aso mountains and volcanoes that dominate the life and livelihood of this area, blotting out almost every other physical feature. Another English writer, the late, much missed Alan Booth, noted the vastness of its outline when, looking for the moon as a navigational point on part of the journey recounted in his classic The Roads to Sata, commented that “I couldn’t see it – only the empty space in the sky where the stars were hidden by the shape of Mount Aso.” The Aso region’s population of 70,000 is swallowed up in the vastness of its grassland and mountain slopes. These deep, eruption-furrowed trenches and grass-covered gutters reminded me of the Mongolian Steppes.

The ideal way to explore the area beyond the main road connecting the caldera with the town would be by bicycle (a steep ride up, a blissful one down) or, time permitting, on foot. The undulating farmland contiguous with the southwestern slopes of Aso-zan is the least touristed, requiring just that extra effort and time to reach. Tracks lead to dark green gorges gleaming with shallow streams cool to the touch even in summer, to horse-grazing pastures, and to dark, mossy slopes and hillocks that look as if tons of spinach had been poured over them. Inside the caldera walls, an ancient fence of curling volcanic rock, the land is greener and darker, its grasses more luxuriant than elsewhere, its earth more fertile. The floor of the caldera is a patchwork of rice-fields and other crops, vigorously farmed by families, some of whom have lived in the area for generations, maintaining a close bond with nature. Once in the caldera, a striking shape materializes on the right side of the road. This is the grass-covered hill known as Komezuka, which, as the name indicates, means inverted rice-bowl. Equally suggestive of the ziggurat or burial mound of some ancient nature cult, it is a configuration of great beauty.


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