History
Oita’s identity is built on water rising out of the ground hot — it has more individual hot spring sources, and produces more hot spring water by total volume, than any other prefecture in Japan, and the whole regional economy and culture organizes around that fact.
Oita and the wider world
Decades before Nagasaki’s Dejima formalized Japan’s narrow, controlled channel to the West, one of the country’s very first documented direct encounters with an Englishman happened by accident on Oita’s coast. In April 1600, the Dutch trading ship Liefde, its crew decimated by disease and starvation after a disastrous Pacific crossing, ran aground off Bungo Province — roughly modern Oita. Among the handful of survivors was William Adams, an English navigator who was brought before Tokugawa Ieyasu (soon to become the founder of the Edo shogunate), impressed him with his knowledge of shipbuilding, mathematics, and navigation, and was eventually granted samurai status, a Japanese name (Miura Anjin), and a fief of his own — becoming a genuine bridge figure between Japan and the West a full half-century before Dejima existed. His story became the basis for James Clavell’s 1975 novel “Shogun,” later adapted into a hit television series.
Neighbors: Oita and the rest of Kyushu
Oita’s accidental, early contact with the West predates and contrasts with Nagasaki’s later, tightly controlled arrangement at Dejima — one prefecture’s story begins with a shipwreck and an improvised alliance, the other with two centuries of careful, bureaucratic management of exactly the same kind of contact.
Getting there and getting around
Oita Airport has domestic flights, and Oita Station is reached from Hakata (Fukuoka) by limited express train in about 2 hours. Beppu and Yufuin are both easily reached from Oita City by local or limited express train.
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