Misumi West Port

The quay at Misumi West Port runs for 756 m along a narrow strait at the tip of the Uto Peninsula, its dressed stone blocks still fitted the way Amakusa masons laid them in the 1880s. Kumamoto Prefecture wanted a trading port, and the government's Dutch water engineer, Rouwenhorst Mulder, surveyed the coast and drew up the plan. Work began in 1884 and the port opened on 15 August 1887; newspapers of the day reported 18 steamships anchored offshore for the celebrations. It is counted among the three great port works of the Meiji era, and Miike coal was shipped abroad from here until Miike Port opened in Omuta.

Its success did not last. The currents and winds in the strait made berthing harder than expected, and when the railway arrived in 1899 its terminus was at Misumi East Port, about 2 km to the east, where the town's station and ferries are now. Trade drifted there, which is why the west port survived with so little change. It is one of the 23 parts of the Sites of Japan's Meiji Industrial Revolution, inscribed in July 2015.

Walk the quay first, then the street behind it. The former Uto District Office has a wooden front plastered to look like stone. Ryujokan, a hall built in 1918, has exhibits for a 200 yen fee and closes on Tuesdays. The white two-storey Urashimaya is a 1993 reconstruction, from old photographs, of a hotel that stood here around 1887; Lafcadio Hearn stopped at the inn in July 1893 on his way back from Nagasaki and wrote about it in The Dream of a Summer Day. Part of the ground floor is a cafe. Lunch is served in an old shipping warehouse, Nishiko Meijikan. An hour covers it all. It is quiet on weekdays, and the strait views do a lot of the work. If you are heading on to the Amakusa islands, it makes an easy stop on the way.