Back in the square outside the railway station he broke for lunch, a rather good curry and a flavoursome product of the local brewery that went down well enough to have me dropping into a bottle shop near the hotel to pick up further examples of the local brewer’s art. The eatery we’d chosen was in one of the outbuildings of a residence in the merchants’ quarter, and a post-prandial stroll through that part of town allowed us to have a good look around before heading slightly uphill to the autumn leaves in the samurai quarter in the northern part of town.
Kakunodate is, by all accounts, one of the best examples of a Japanese castle town though the castle itself hasn’t survived and several of the the samurai houses, now privately owned by descendants of the samurai warriors are open to the public.
