I visited Fukuoka so many times during my stay in Japan that I dare say I could call it home. More than any other place in Japan - apart from my own town and surrounding countryside - I was able to get a feel for it, to have an instinctive sense of its personality rather than one or two travel stories.
Fukuoka may not be a tourist destination, but it is full of interesting and strange things nonetheless. It is famous for its food stalls (yatai) that line the streets by the hundreds after dark; it contains Nakasu-kawabata, a tiny entertainment district that has the highest concentration of bars out of any area in Japan; there are quiet gardens, ancient Zen temples, and sprawling manicured parks only meters form a modern harbor with huge shopping malls, a baseball stadium, and amusement parks.
The city is broken up by a number of shallow, dirty rivers that flow in from the sea (hence their shallowness at low tide, long a mystery to me), and ringed by a bright green elevated expressway. Along the rivers are innumerable little bridges, and brown-down, ivy-covered wooden buildings line their shores. The rest of the city may look sparkling-new or just a little outdated, but along the banks are rotting pieces of old Japan, windows securely shuttered against the outside world even as the tile roofs are caving in.
There was a certain spirit there, the modern mixed with the ancient. The nighttime food stalls had an atmosphere of Japan from a century ago, even as skyscrapers towered overhead and music pounded in the nightclubs until the early hours of the morning. The neighborhood restaurants and aged temples happily shared space with 7-11 and Starbucks, and somehow it was an appealing mix rather than a clash. One could stand with the ocean to one's back, looking pas the seedy harbor area, past the gleaming towers rising behind it, all the way to the hazy green mountains behind it all - and it seemed a perfect picture.
It is the only place I have ever been able to say that I am homesick for.
What made Fukuoka so appealing to me, however, was not simply its sights and its shops. I may have had my favorite neighborhoods, but it wasn't just for the houses and the parks that I loved them. It was for the bright and colorful personality of the people.
One thing I did not expect Fukuoka to be was welcoming. Why? Even if it does routinely get ranked as the most livable city in Asia, it is still located in xenophobic Japan, and in the south no less. Being far from Tokyo and its surrounding cities, I wondered if I would be stared at, talked about, even denied a table at a restaurant for my foreignness.
This may have happened to me elsewhere in Japan - even in large cities like Nagoya and Osaka - but never once did I feel genuinely unwelcome in Fukuoka. I did not know just now tolerant the city was until I took a train up to Nagoya to visit a friend, and had the singular experience of being stared at by every single person in a crowded subway car. It was downright eerie, and even more so because such a thing would have never happened back in Fukuoka. Certainly, I sometimes caught someone looking at me in the subway or on the bus, but when I caught their gaze, they looked away, like a normal person would anywhere else. Not so in other major cities of Japan.
One element that lent Fukuoka its tolerance, at least in part, added a certain flavor to the city as well: it was thoroughly international. This might seem provincial to my readers from the United States or Canada (it was no Toronto, after all), but for homogenous Japan, this was significant. Koreans, Chinese, Indians, Africans, Brazilians, Europeans - they were all here, and in great and visible numbers. I heard a babble of languages around me in the neighborhoods frequented by foreigners, and ethnic bars and restaurants appeared in profusion. Where else in Japan could I take a reggaeton dance class from one of the most esteemed choreographers in Colombia, have my hair cut by a French stylist, and have dinner and drinks at a Mexican cafe? It may not have had anything on Tokyo, but for a city of its size, Fukuoka left the others in the dust; I thanked my luck every time I visited it that I was near enough to discover these places.
The city's flavor didn't simply belong to the foreigners, however. It was the people themselves - loud, colorful, tanned, with bright clothes and rough dialect. Not everyone fit into the image I have of the quintessential children of Hakata, as they are called, but I always picture the kids that rode their low-rider bikes through my favorite shopping district. Their patterned orange pants might clash with a black-and-white striped top, layered over a clashing yellow shirt; their hair would be a messy, shaggy cut bleached to orange; their eyes were hidden behind wraparound yellow sunglasses. They wander into stores with names like "Candy Stripper" and lounge around aimlessly in Kego Park, perpetually engaged in a cooler-than-thou competition.
And their elder counterparts? The friendly, middle-aged shop proprietor; the gold-toothed young guy at the ramen shop with a pink bandana wrapped around his shaved head; the woman playing with her little children in a city park.
In short, with all of its charm and flavor, Fukuoka was really enjoyable because it was so livable, so inviting, and so easy to regard - in all its easy normalcy - as a home away from home.