Day four of twenty is a rest day, and it is the one that changes the shape of the whole trip. A morning at the Peace Memorial and an afternoon on an island with deer on the ferry ramp.
Why a rest day here and not somewhere prettier
A twenty-day motorcycle tour needs days off the bike. Three weeks of consecutive riding is more than most bodies want, and the rest days are where the trip gets its rhythm.
Where you put them is a choice. You could put day four in a hot spring town and let people sleep. Our Japan route puts it in Hiroshima, and riders arrive on day three from Kurashiki wondering slightly why.
By the evening of day four they have stopped wondering. This is the day that people talk about at dinner two weeks later, and it is the one that makes a Japan trip something other than a very good ride through nice scenery.
Getting there: the Yamato and the Inland Sea
The approach matters. Day three runs from Kurashiki through Kure and into Hiroshima, along the Seto Inland Sea, which is a sheltered body of water dotted with several hundred islands and which has been the maritime heart of Japan for a very long time.
Kure was the naval yard where the battleship Yamato was built, the largest battleship ever constructed and a vessel that has a specific and complicated place in Japanese memory. The museum there holds a one-tenth scale model, twenty-six metres long, and a great deal of material about what the ship was, what it was for, and how it ended.
It is worth an hour on the way through and it sets up the following day in a way that arriving cold does not. You come into Hiroshima having already been thinking about the war.
The Peace Memorial Park, and how to do it
The morning of day four is the Peace Memorial Park and the museum, and there is no gentle way to write this section.
On 6 August 1945 the first atomic weapon used against people detonated roughly six hundred metres above this city. The park sits on the ground beneath it. The Genbaku Dome, the skeletal remains of a exhibition hall that stood almost directly under the hypocentre and survived because the blast came straight down, has been left exactly as it was.
The museum is not a monument. It is a carefully assembled account of what happened to individual people, told largely through objects: a child’s tricycle, a watch stopped at 8.15, clothing, shadows. It is one of the most effective museums in the world and it is extremely difficult to walk through.
Riders arrive expecting a historical exhibit and leave quiet. Groups that were chatty at breakfast do not talk much at lunch. That is the correct reaction and nobody should feel obliged to be cheerful about it.
Allow at least two hours and do not schedule anything demanding afterwards.
What the city itself is like
Here is the thing that surprises people most, and it is worth saying because the expectation is wrong.
Hiroshima is not a sombre city. It is a lively, green, prosperous place of well over a million people, with trams, a river delta, good food and an enormous amount of ordinary life going on. The park occupies a specific area and the rest of the city has got on with being a city.
There is something in that which is more affecting than the memorial itself: the demonstration that this is what happened afterwards. People rebuilt, and then they had children, and now there is a tram going past a department store.
Eat okonomiyaki while you are here. The Hiroshima version is layered rather than mixed, built on a griddle with noodles in it, and it is one of the great regional dishes of Japan. The multi-storey buildings full of nothing but okonomiyaki counters are exactly as good as they sound.
Miyajima in the afternoon
Then, in the afternoon, you take a short ferry across to an island that is one of the most photographed places in the country, and the mood changes completely.
Itsukushima, universally called Miyajima, holds a shrine built out over the water on stilts, with a vermilion torii gate standing in the sea in front of it. At high tide the whole thing appears to float. At low tide you can walk out to the gate across the sand.
The island has been considered sacred for a very long time, which is why the shrine was built over the water rather than on the ground: commoners were not permitted to set foot on the island at all, and approached by boat through the gate.
It is busy, and it is worth it anyway. The trick is timing: most day-trippers come from Hiroshima in the middle of the day and leave in the late afternoon, so the last couple of hours of light are considerably quieter than the middle.
The deer, which are not a petting zoo
Miyajima has a substantial population of sika deer wandering freely through the village and along the waterfront, entirely unafraid of people.
They are also thieves. They will take food out of a hand, out of a bag, and famously out of a pocket, and they eat paper, which means ferry tickets and maps are at genuine risk. People find this funny until it is their ticket.
Do not feed them. It is discouraged locally for good reasons, it makes them more aggressive with the next visitor, and it is bad for the animals.
They are, however, a photograph nobody expects: a deer standing in front of a thousand-year-old shrine gate, entirely unbothered.
Climbing Misen, if the legs are willing
The island has a mountain on it, Misen, at around five hundred metres, and there are two ways up: a walking track of a couple of hours, or a ropeway that does most of the work.
The summit gives you the Inland Sea laid out with its islands, which on a clear late afternoon is one of the better views in western Japan. There are old temple buildings on the way up and a flame that has reportedly been burning continuously for over a thousand years.
Whether it fits depends on how the morning has left you. Plenty of riders do the museum, eat, cross to the island and then want to sit by the water rather than climb a mountain, and that is an entirely sensible use of a rest day.
What a rest day is actually for
Worth stating, because riders new to long tours frequently want to ride on the rest days and have to be talked out of it.
Physically, a day off the bike lets the specific fatigue of riding, the neck, the shoulders, the wrists, the lower back, unwind before it compounds. Twenty consecutive riding days without a break produces a group that is visibly slower and less sharp by the third week.
Mechanically, it is when the bikes get looked at properly. Chains, tyres, fluid levels, the fastener that has been working loose. A mechanic with a stationary group and a full day does a different job from one working in a car park at seven in the evening.
And socially, it is when a group of strangers turns into a group. People who have spent three days in helmets discover on the rest day who they are travelling with, and the second half of the trip is different because of it.
The other rest days on this route
For context, because the pattern matters more than any single day.
Day nine is Fukuoka, which is an eating city with an extraordinary street-food culture in the riverside yatai stalls, and which is the counterpoint to Hiroshima: a rest day that is pure pleasure.
Day seventeen is the Mount Fuji area, near the end, when people are tired and the mountain is either visible or not depending on luck.
Three rest days in twenty is roughly the right ratio for this kind of distance, and the spacing means you never go more than about five days without one.
Riding in and out of a city
A practical note, since Hiroshima is one of the few genuinely urban stops on the route.
Japanese cities are easy to ride in by Asian standards and harder than open road. Lane discipline is absolute, everybody indicates, and nobody does anything unexpected, which makes it far less stressful than Hanoi or Bangkok. What is difficult is parking, which is regulated and not free, and navigation, because the road layout is dense.
The bikes stay at the hotel on the rest day and the city is done on foot, tram and ferry, which is by far the best way to see it. Hiroshima’s tram network is extensive, cheap and includes some very old rolling stock, a few carriages of which survived the bombing and are still in service, which is a strange and moving thing to ride on.
Getting around without the bike
A practical note, since this is the one day of the trip where the motorcycle stays parked.
Hiroshima’s tram network is the way to move around the city. It is extensive, cheap, and it runs on a mixture of modern low-floor vehicles and some elderly rolling stock. A handful of the older carriages survived the bombing and remain in service, which is a strange thing to be sitting in.
The route to Miyajima is straightforward: a tram or a train west to Miyajimaguchi, then a short ferry across the channel. There is also a direct boat from the Peace Park along the river and out into the bay, which takes longer, costs more and is a considerably better way to arrive, because you approach the island from the water the way visitors have for a thousand years.
Both the tram network and the ferries take the national IC cards, which are the tap-and-go transport cards used across Japan, and which are worth having from the first day of any trip that touches a city. A tour guide will normally sort these out on arrival.
Walking is the other answer. The Peace Park, the museum, the castle and the main shopping arcades are all within a comfortable radius, and after several days in riding boots a day on foot is part of the point.
How to behave, briefly
The Peace Memorial Park is a memorial and a burial site as much as a museum, and the tone people take there matters.
Quiet voices. No eating in the park. Photographs are permitted and photographs of yourself smiling in front of the Genbaku Dome are not the thing to do. The paper cranes left at the children’s memorial are offerings rather than decoration.
At Itsukushima, the shrine is an active place of worship. Bow at the torii if you feel inclined, keep to the walkways, and be conscious that people are praying while you are photographing.
None of this is complicated and all of it is noticed.
The Inland Sea, which is the region you are in
Worth zooming out, because Hiroshima sits in a landscape that shapes the whole first week of this route.
The Seto Inland Sea separates three of Japan’s four main islands and holds several hundred islands of its own. It has been the country’s principal maritime corridor for over a thousand years, sheltered enough for small craft, dotted with ports, and lined with towns that grew up on the trade.
For a rider the consequence is a coastline of bays, headlands and bridges rather than open ocean, with the water almost always in view and islands stacked in the middle distance. It is calmer and more domestic than the Pacific coast, and it photographs in a way people do not associate with Japan.
The Shimanami Kaido, further east, crosses the sea on a chain of bridges between the main island and Shikoku, and it is one of the great rides in the country. It is not on this itinerary and it is the obvious extension for anybody who comes back.
Kyushu, which starts the day after
Day five leaves Hiroshima and heads west and south, and the trip changes character again.
The route runs to the Kintai Bridge at Iwakuni, a five-arch wooden structure from the seventeenth century, then across the Akiyoshidai karst plateau, which is a limestone landscape unlike anywhere else in Japan and which carries a good road across the top of it. Then Yuda Onsen, then over the Kanmon crossing into Kyushu.
Kyushu is where the riding peaks on this route: the Yamanami Highway across the Kuju highlands, the Aso caldera, the Milk Road along its northern rim. That block of days is the reason a lot of people book a Japan motorcycle tour in the first place.
Putting the rest day immediately before it is deliberate. You go into the best riding of the trip rested, on bikes that have been looked at, with a group that has become a group.
What riders say afterwards
The consistent pattern, across departures, is that people book a Japan trip for the roads and come home talking about day four.
Partly that is the sheer weight of the morning. Partly it is the contrast with the afternoon, which is one of the more beautiful places in the country and which follows immediately. And partly it is that a motorcycle tour is an unusually good way to arrive somewhere like this: you have ridden in through the countryside, you have some sense of the scale of the country, and you are not a person who got off a coach.
It is also the day that makes clear what a big biking tour is actually buying you on a route like this, over and above the roads. Anybody can find Hiroshima. Having somebody who knows to route you through Kure the day before, and who has put the rest day here rather than somewhere easier, is the difference.
What the bikes get on a rest day
The unglamorous half of a day off, and the reason a mechanic travels with the group.
Three days of riding puts real wear on a fleet. Chains stretch and need adjusting and lubricating. Tyre pressures drift. Brake pads on a route with mountain descents wear faster than anybody expects. Fasteners work loose. And on any group of a dozen machines, something will have developed a noise.
A stationary day lets all of that be dealt with properly, in daylight, with the bikes lined up and time to do the job rather than a torch in a hotel car park at eight in the evening.
It is also when a problem gets caught before it becomes a roadside stop. A chain adjusted on day four is a chain that does not need attention on a mountain road on day six, and a pad noticed at half worn is a pad replaced before the descent from Aso.
Riding Japan for real
Our twenty-day Japan motorbike tour runs Osaka to Kyoto the long way, with Hiroshima and Miyajima as the day-four rest day, then Kyushu over the Yamanami Highway and the Aso caldera, up the Sea of Japan coast past Izumo and the Tottori dunes, into the Japanese Alps at Matsumoto and around Mount Fuji before the final ride into Kyoto. Onsen towns at Yuda, Beppu, Kinosaki and Gero.
Small group, road captain, tour guide, mechanic and support vehicle, with the tolls and the hotels handled. Have a look at the 20-day Japan Endless Discovery tour or the Japan motorcycle tours page. If you want to know which departure catches the best weather for the Inland Sea, message us on WhatsApp before you book a guided tour and we will tell you what the season does.
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