Current Time in Kurume, Japan

Kurume lies in Fukuoka Prefecture in the northern part of Kyushu, the southwesternmost of Japan's four main islands. It sits on the Chikugo, the largest river in Kyushu, at the edge of a broad and fertile plain, with the wooded slopes of Mount Kora rising to the south. The climate is warm and humid, with hot summers, heavy early summer rains and mild winters that allow flowers to bloom early.

Around three hundred thousand people live in the city, making it one of the largest in the prefecture after Fukuoka and Kitakyushu. It is a regional centre for medicine, education, rubber manufacturing, textiles and food, and it serves the surrounding farming districts of the Chikugo plain, known for rice, fruit, green tea and sake.

The town grew around a castle held from the early seventeenth century by the Arima family, whose domain covered much of the region. Only the stone walls and moats of Kurume Castle remain, standing beside a shrine dedicated to the clan, but the layout of the old town survives in the street pattern. Long before that, the area was an important religious centre, and the Kora Taisha shrine on the mountainside, reached by a long stone stairway, has looked out over the plain for more than a thousand years. Kurume is also the head shrine of Suitengu, a water deity whose branches are found across Japan, and the riverside sanctuary here is the origin of them all.

Two crafts made the city famous. Kurume kasuri is an indigo dyed cotton cloth woven with threads tied and resisted before dyeing so that patterns emerge in soft, blurred outlines, a technique developed by a young local woman in the late eighteenth century and now protected as an important intangible cultural property. The other is the Kurume azalea, a group of small flowered varieties bred here over generations and exported around the world, celebrated each spring at a hillside park where tens of thousands of shrubs bloom in waves of pink, red and white.

Kurume also has a strong claim to be the birthplace of tonkotsu ramen, the rich pork bone broth that has since conquered Japan and much of the world, first served at a street stall here in the 1930s. Ramen shops throughout the city keep the tradition alive, and there is a small museum devoted to it.

The company that became Bridgestone, one of the largest tyre manufacturers in the world, was founded in Kurume, and its founder endowed the city with the Ishibashi Cultural Centre, a park containing an art museum, rose gardens and concert facilities that give the city an unusually rich cultural life for its size.

Kurume University is well known for medicine, and several other colleges add to the student population. Shinkansen trains stop here, placing Fukuoka fifteen minutes away, and local lines and highways connect the region.

Kurume is appreciated for its textiles, flowers, food and quietly confident regional culture.