Karatsu

Each November, fourteen enormous lacquered floats shaped like sea bream, samurai helmets and lion heads are hauled through Karatsu's streets by teams of hundreds. The Karatsu Kunchi has thundered through this pottery town for centuries. Between festivals Karatsu moves more quietly — kiln smoke drifting from ceramic studios, and a five-kilometre pine forest curving along the beach toward Korea.

Karatsu faces the Genkai Sea from Saga Prefecture's northern shore, one of the closest Japanese cities to the Korean Peninsula and once the port for ships bound there. Karatsu-yaki, its rough, earthy pottery, grew from techniques that came across the strait four centuries ago and became a favourite of the tea masters; working kilns still fire on the hillsides and a gallery by the station shows the range. The Kunchi runs from 2 to 4 November, and for the other eleven months the fourteen floats wait in the exhibition hall beside the station. Niji no Matsubara, the Rainbow Pine Grove, is a five-kilometre stretch of about a million pines planted along the bay in the Edo period as a natural seawall and ranked among the three finest pine groves in Japan. Up the coast at Yobuko, a morning market more than a century old runs along a single street, and the squid is served so fresh it is still translucent.