☔️ Matsue in the Rain — Following the World of BAKEBAKE & Lafcadio Hearn 🇯🇵 | June 20th, 2026

☔️ My first day in Matsue, Shimane — a city I first became fascinated by through BAKEBAKE, an NHK morning drama inspired by the lives of Setsu Koizumi and Lafcadio Hearn (Koizumi Yakumo), and their world of ghost stories, folklore, and everyday life in Meiji-era Japan. 👻 What drew me to Matsue was something a little different from the usual image of a beautiful tourist destination. The skies here are often cloudy. Rain comes and goes. The streets can feel quiet, subdued, and even a little melancholy. 🌧️☁️ But after watching BAKEBAKE, that atmosphere felt like part of Matsue’s beauty rather than something that took away from it. Lafcadio Hearn was fascinated by Japanese folklore — ghosts, spirits, legends, old beliefs, and the mysterious things that exist just beyond what we can see. He listened to these stories, wrote about them, and introduced a side of Japan that even many Japanese people were beginning to overlook as the country rapidly modernized. 🏯 So on my first day, I visited Hearn’s former residence and the Lafcadio Hearn Memorial Museum, wandered through Matsue’s old samurai district, and tried to imagine the city he encountered more than a century ago. 🍣 I ended the day at the extremely popular local restaurant Kaiten Sushi Hokkaido, where I had some genuinely incredible sushi, before heading back through the quiet evening scenery. 🌫️ A rainy arrival in Matsue — and the beginning of three days exploring a quieter, stranger, and more mysterious side of Japan.