Kagoshima

Kagoshima Prefecture occupies the southern end of Kyushu – the Satsuma and Ōsumi peninsulas wrapped around Kinkō Bay – and a long string of islands reaching towards Okinawa: Tanegashima, Yakushima, the Tokara Islands and the Amami Islands. Its capital, Kagoshima city, faces Sakurajima across the bay, one of the most active volcanoes in Japan, whose ash falls on the city several times a year.

For almost seven centuries this was the domain of the Shimazu clan. Satsuma controlled the Ryukyu Kingdom from 1609, ran a lucrative trade through it, built Japan's first Western-style factories in the 1850s and supplied many of the leaders of the Meiji Restoration, above all Saigō Takamori and Ōkubo Toshimichi. The Satsuma Rebellion of 1877, the last civil war in Japan, ended on the hill of Shiroyama above the capital.

The prefecture holds two natural World Heritage properties – Yakushima (1993) and, with Okinawa, the Amami-Ōshima and Tokunoshima components of the 2021 inscription – as well as the Shūseikan industrial site, part of the Meiji Industrial Revolution property. It is one of Japan's great farming prefectures, known for black pork, beef, sweet potatoes, green tea and the sweet-potato spirit imo-jōchū.

The name Kagoshima (鹿児島) is old and of uncertain origin. It first referred to the area around Sakurajima and the bay; explanations range from the ancient word kago for a steep cliff to a reading linked to deer (shika, 鹿) – none is certain. The castle town of the Shimazu took the name, and in 1871 the domain of Satsuma became Kagoshima Prefecture.

The prefecture unites the two ancient provinces of Satsuma in the west and Ōsumi in the east, which together formed the core of the Shimazu domain. The Amami Islands, part of the Ryukyu Kingdom until Satsuma seized them in 1609, were attached to Ōsumi in the Meiji period and remained with Kagoshima. Miyazaki was merged into Kagoshima in 1876; when it was re-established as a separate prefecture in 1883, the modern border was fixed.

Kagoshima is shaped by volcanism. The Aira caldera, formed by a vast eruption some 30,000 years ago, is the northern basin of Kinkō Bay, with Sakurajima rising at its southern rim; further south the Ata caldera holds Lake Ikeda and the conical Kaimon-dake. Deep deposits of pale volcanic ash and pumice called shirasu cover much of the mainland, creating plateaus of poor, fast-draining soil that suited sweet potatoes and tea rather than rice.

North-east lies the Kirishima range, straddling the border with Miyazaki. Offshore, the prefecture spans roughly 600 kilometres of sea: the flat, farmed island of Tanegashima, mountainous Yakushima, the volcanic Tokara Islands and the subtropical Amami Islands with their coral reefs and dense forests.

The mainland has a warm, humid subtropical climate with hot summers, mild winters and heavy rain during the early-summer rainy season; typhoons pass most years in late summer and autumn. Yakushima is one of the wettest places in Japan, with rainfall rising steeply with altitude, while its summit area can see snow in winter. The Amami Islands are subtropical, with warm winters and high humidity. Ash from Sakurajima is a routine feature of daily life in Kagoshima city, especially when summer winds blow from the east.

In antiquity southern Kyushu was the land of the Hayato, who resisted integration into the Yamato state until the early eighth century. From the late twelfth century the Shimazu clan held the area; their rule, uninterrupted to 1871, is among the longest of any Japanese house. Being the first landfall from the south brought early contact with Europe: Portuguese firearms reached Tanegashima in 1543 and Francis Xavier landed at Kagoshima in 1549.

In 1609 Satsuma invaded the Ryukyu Kingdom, annexed the Amami Islands and controlled Ryukyu's trade with China, a source of wealth that helped the domain finance reform in the nineteenth century. Under Shimazu Nariakira, Satsuma built reverberatory furnaces, a shipyard and glass and textile works at Iso. After the bombardment of Kagoshima by a British squadron in 1863, Satsuma sought British contacts, sent students to London in 1865 and allied with Chōshū in 1866 to overthrow the shogunate.

Satsuma men dominated the early Meiji state, but the break between Saigō Takamori and the government led to the Satsuma Rebellion of 1877. In the Second World War Chiran and Kanoya were bases for tokkō (special attack) flights. The Amami Islands were placed under US administration after the war and returned to Japan in December 1953.

Satsuma culture was shaped by its samurai: the domain had an unusually large warrior class, schooled in the gōjū system of neighbourhood education and in the fierce Jigen-ryū school of swordsmanship. The local dialect, Kagoshima-ben, is famously hard for other Japanese to follow. The Amami Islands have a distinct culture closer to Ryukyu, with their own shima-uta songs, sanshin music and festivals.

Kagoshima's food reflects its shirasu soils and southern climate: sweet potatoes (satsuma-imo, named after the province), black-haired Berkshire-line pork, beef and chicken, and fish from warm seas. Shōchū distilled from sweet potato is the everyday drink; sake is scarcely made. Amami adds its own island dishes and brown-sugar shōchū.

Agriculture and food processing are the backbone of the economy. Kagoshima is among Japan's leading producers of pigs, beef cattle and broiler chickens, and it vies with Shizuoka as the largest tea-growing prefecture. Sweet potatoes feed the shōchū and starch industries; farmed eel, bonito flakes from Makurazaki and Yamakawa, and yellowtail from the bays are major fishery products. Electronics and semiconductor plants cluster around Kirishima, and JAXA launches rockets from Tanegashima and Uchinoura.