Rained in for real this time

Throughout the night, thunderstorms blew through the area, and up until noon, downpours would erupt suddenly, then dissipate almost as quickly as they came. I took advantage of one of the lulls to head to the convenience store and get some fruit, bread, and juice for breakfast. Sumi was impressively able to sleep through most of it, and almost made it out of bed by noon.

When it finally stopped raining for good, we took advantage of it and walked over to the Nobeoka Castle Ruins just a few blocks to the west of our hotel. I say walked, swam was more like it. It was oppressively humid now, with 100% humidity and 80 degree temps. But the troopers we are, we kept going, keeping the whining and complaining down to about once every five minutes.

Nobeoka castle was built high up on a bluff overlooking the many rivers that flow through the town. The walls surrounding the main keep are, along with Kumamoto castle's walls, the tallest in Kyuushuu, measuring over 19 meters. It's important to note that when these walls were built, they were simply stacked by hand and filled in with smaller rocks. It was an amazing feat of engineering that many of these walls are still standing five hundred years later.

Park entrance. The castle is up at the top in the back

Reconstructed gate leading up. Always up.

"The Wall of 1000 Deaths"

It is called that because it was said, if one of the foundation stones were pulled, it would all collapse, killing 1000 enemy soldiers in the process. That is not very confidence-building.

At the top of the climb was, once again, a Very Important Man.

Masataka Naito. He has nothing to do with the castle, but was a leader in education at the start of the Meiji era, from what I can tell.

Along with Naito-san, there is a large bell that is still used to mark hours for the city

A pretty good view of the city

and a few more memorials to people important to Nobeoka, including Bokusui Wakayama, a poet from the turn of the century who drank himself to death by the age of 43.

There is also a whole museum that we did not visit about Saigo Takamori. Westerners who have seen the pretty awful The Last Samurai film will know him as the title character (not Tom Cruise). Nobeoka castle was taken over by him and his samurais during the uprising.

It was so humid, even the mosquitos were unwilling to move, so we decided to seek refuge in a local ramen shop that was about half a mile from the park. A few things of note spotted on the way

Site of an old church

There are a lot of Christian churches in Kyuushuu. To make a long story short, during the Meiji Restoration there was a lot of Christian persecution, specifically in this area, not because of religion (Japanese are, by and large, supremely indifferent to religious differences and often don't really understand monotheism), but because the foreign Christian evangelists were fomenting discord and rebellion among the poor. While they probably had a point, given some of the living conditions of the time, converting citizens of a foreign land to your religion and telling them to disobey their government on religious grounds is likely to incite some reaction. Combine that with the general zealotry of the Meiji Restoration and you have a recipe for some pretty awful stuff.

This guy is a mechanical sign that is continuously bowing people into a sushi restaurant. No special meaning or anything. I just love these kinds of things.

The ramen was good, by the way

 With our ramen mission completed, we headed back to the hotel, with a quick detour to FamilyMart for some ice cream, and spent the remainder of the day doing a lot of nothing, the last time we'll be doing that this trip. Tomorrow, we head out to Takachiho, a picturesque town in the mountains near Aso, and from there to Aso itself to conclude the cycling portion of our trip. It always seems to go by too fast...