Yame to Nagasaki

One of Japan’s cultural highlights is the tea ceremony. Michael visits a Kyushu tea farm where morning fog shades the tea plants, helping the leaves grow greener and richer in flavour.

Michael takes one of the newest Shinkansen lines to Nagasaki, the only port open to foreign trade when Japan was closed to the outside world for more than 200 years. Michael learns of the Scottish industrialist Thomas Glover, who helped samurai clans overthrow the shogun and played a pivotal role in Japan’s industrialisation.

There is also a boat to visit a remarkable coal-mining island, first developed in the 1890s, which grew into a small town with schools, barbers and a cinema. During the 1960s, it had a population density nine times that of central Tokyo.