Fukuoka

The yatai fold open at dusk. Canvas-topped food stalls line the river and the streets around Nakasu and Tenjin, each seating a handful of people on stools before a counter of steaming pots. Sharing a counter with strangers over tonkotsu ramen at midnight is the tradition, and most of them arrived alone too. Fukuoka feeds itself this way — elbow to elbow, under a tarpaulin, one bowl at a time.

Fukuoka is Kyūshū's largest city and closer to Seoul than to Tokyo, which is why the Mongol invasion fleets chose Hakata Bay as their landing point in the thirteenth century. Street stalls vanished from most of Japan with the post-war boom, but Fukuoka kept nearly a hundred of them along Watanabe-dōri and the Nakasu riverside, and the world's food writers have noticed. Hakata ramen is the city's dish: a creamy tonkotsu pork-bone broth simmered for hours, with the thin straight noodles that distinguish it from the rest of Kyūshū, and mentaiko — spicy cod roe — turns up in everything from rice bowls to sushi. Each July the Hakata Gion Yamakasa festival races towering floats through the streets at dawn, Ōhori Park loops a lake in the city centre, and beaches lie within an hour of the station.