Stephen Mansfield 
A boatman and children in traditional dress, pass along a canal lined with cherry blossoms. (©Stephen Mansfield)
Among Japan's canal cities, Yanagawa is the loveliest. If that sounds more like the kind of gushing blurb associated with guidebooks and travel blogs than an objective appraisal, it does, in this instance, ring true.
Commercial barges no longer unload their cargo at its stone quays in quite the same quantities as before. But the labyrinth of canals and old moats that run through the former castle town in Fukuoka Prefecture, are still vital to the local economy of a town that is neither too large nor too restricted. Small enough to get around on foot, many visitors also elect to view it from the repose of a canal barge.
The main attraction of Yanagawa, in fact, is its willow-lined canals, which flow by old samurai villas, luxuriating back gardens, and old brick storehouses. The stone-banked waterways, old moats, water locks, and sluice gates form a complex labyrinthine design that adds depth and interest to the town.
Also, there is usually a story or meaning behind the design that is not immediately apparent. The sluice gates, for example, once had the secondary function of controlling water levels to create a strong defensive network. Stone steps leading down to the canals are broad, hinting at their former use. They were not just loading bays for watercraft, but also scrubbing boards for women who would bring their laundry down here for a good wash.
Hot Sake on a 'Donkobune'
Yanagawa's flat-bottomed boats, a little like Venetian gondolas, but without the rising grandeur of their black prows, are called donkobune. Tourists expect the men in happi coats, who use poles to propel the boats along the shallow canals, to burst into song at some time. The punters generally oblige. However, these local folk songs are a far cry from the arias and snatches of operetta performed by their Venetian counterparts. These boatmen take visitors on one-hour cruises known by the lyrical-sounding term kawakudari (descending the river).
The boats are all season, but if you take one in the winter when mists are known to occasionally swirl over the waters, you will be able to tuck yourself under warm quilts placed over heaters known as kotatsu-bune. It's a cozy way to drift around the canals on these chilly days. And there is nothing quite like cupping your hands around a flask of hot sake, while tucked under a nicely toasty quilt.
Contrasting with the hardness of stone water gates, embankments are overgrown with grasses, blue flags, irises, and cosmos, making the waterways seem more like natural rivers than canals. Only their regularity hints at human intervention.
Discovering the Town
The complex of canals steers visitors around the town. However, its back streets offer a glimpse into an equally intriguing world. This is where old single-story wooden houses in the back lanes of the town hint at a way of life defiantly belonging to the slow lane. I noticed several engawa (wooden corridors between paper screen room doors and sliding glass panels) running along the side of homes facing onto quiet Japanese gardens.
Carefully tended vegetable patches provide further evidence of the good life. Traces of the city's antiquity are found more here than in the canals themselves, whose routes are well traversed by visitors. Here in the back streets at the core of the original town, within the network of waterways, rustic houses, worn stone walls, drain covers, and well-weathered shrines, are pockets of serenity for locals and the occasional curious visitor.
Canals of a Castle Town
If old prints and the scale of the grounds are anything to go by, the castle that once stood at the heart of the canal system, like a spider at the center of its web, was an impressive piece of architecture. Look hard enough and you can find a few foundation stones amidst the weeds of the old site. It's a pretty plot of land with an underlying melancholy that evokes the uneasy lines of an old haiku by the poet Matsuo Basho:
A mound of summer grass
Warrior's heroic deeds
Are they only dreams that pass
Yanagawa was founded by the Kamachi clan in the 16th century. Its water sources, however, are far older, dating back to the Yayoi period (300 BC-250 AD) when a sink of damp lowland existed near the mouth of several rivers that funneled into the nearby Ariake Sea.
Canals were dug to drain the land and improve its agricultural prospects. The canals remain more or less intact, covering a total length of 470 kilometers. A good 12% in fact, of the town's surface area is water.
Old Lanes and Mossy Headstones
The angularity of Yanagawa's grid of canals contrasts with the winding lanes of the old town that transect it. An aerial view would no doubt reveal something like an octopus sitting on a chessboard. Like many older towns in Japan, Yanagawa consists of two parallel sectors: a more recent, architecturally traumatized area of the sort seen everywhere in Japan, contrasting with an older, more intriguing quarter.
Despite the visitor appeal of its canals, there is something endearingly old-fashioned about Yanagawa. Genuinely old buildings remain, along with a disproportionately large number of shrines and temples. Many need restoration, their roofs weather-beaten, copper guttering distorted, bronze finials oxidized, and headstones blotched with moss.
A Colorful Hina Festival of Dolls
Water has influenced not only the economy of the town but also its cultural life. Many of Yanagawa's festivals are water-borne affairs.
The spring Hina Matsuri, or Children's Doll Festival, assumes an interesting form along the canals of Yanagawa, as boats laden with girls dressed as Hina dolls and women in court attire, float beneath the town's bridges.
The vessels are decorated with sagemon, vividly designed cloth balls, birds, miniature dolls, fragrant pouches, and a host of other shapes, which are hung from frames like mobiles. It is a traditional custom in the town for mothers to sew sagemon when a child is born.
Cuisine Built Around the Water
Mention the name Yanagawa to a Japanese, however, and, chances are, their first thoughts will be less of festivals than of eel dishes. Eating baked and steamed Unagi no Seiromushi, rice and eel steamed with a sauce made from sugar and soy, with a finely sliced omelet on top, is part of the Yanagawa experience. The fish is said to increase a person's stamina, especially during the dog days of summer. At lunchtime, the whole town seems to smell of baked eel, as charcoal-infused smoke billows out into the street from vents at the side of restaurants.
In winter, visitors can sample duck. Yanagawa nabe, small fish cooked with local vegetables and egg in an earthenware pot, is another local specialty.
Meiji Poets and Pines Islands
Much tourist mileage is extracted from the fact that Yanagawa is the birthplace of the poet Hakushu Kitahara (1885-1942). He was a prolific writer, whose opus includes almost 200 books, ranging from belles-lettres and children's verse to contemporary tanka poems. Hakushu's early life was spent among the canals here, and by all accounts, it seems to have been a pleasant childhood. His parents owned one of the prosperous redbrick sake breweries that still stand in the town to this day. You can see the rear of the brewery from the canal boats and some of the footbridges that cross that part of the system.
The family's wealth provided him with the funds to attend Waseda University. There, judging from photos displayed in the old family home, now a museum known as the Hakushu Seika, he took on the dress and mannerisms of dissolute European painters and symbolist poets that were de rigueur at the time. One image shows a foppish, doe-eyed young man in an overcoat resembling Matisse's painting smock.
Other worthy Yanagawa sights include a Meiji period (1868-1912) house called the Ohana, and an attached garden, renamed Shotoen Park. Reinforcing the town's enduring leitmotif of water, the garden mirrors in miniature, the pine islands of Matsushima in Sendai.
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Author: Stephen Mansfield
