Kyushu
Prairie Stuart-Wolff spoke next to no Japanese when she moved to Japan with her wife, ceramist Hanako Nakazato. Had she relocated to Tokyo or Osaka, the American writer and photographer would have probably gotten by just fine with English alone, but her aging in-laws lived in rural Mirukashi on the island of Kyushu. While Nakazato worked and oversaw construction of their new home and studio, Stuart-Wolff hung around the kitchen with her mother-in-law, Kuniko. “I was just watching at first, then helping with dishes, and slowly trying my hand at prep tasks,” she recalls. Kuniko’s kitchen is “how and where I started to feel at home in Japan.” She took notes, which evolved into a book of recipes—which in turn flourished into Mirukashi Salon, the immersive culinary workshop Stuart-Wolff and Nakazato launched this year, just as Japan fully reopened to overseas tourists. The small-group program ($3,150 per person for four nights, all inclusive) follows the 72 micro-seasons of Japan—the cooking lessons, foraging walks, and artisan outings shifting slightly as persimmons yield to yuzu, sansho pepper buds ripen, and new wakame seaweed appears offshore. Between meals and trips to soy sauce brewers and tea farmers, guests stay on turquoise Karatsu Bay, an ideal base for exploring Kyushu, an island with “mountains to climb, waves to surf, roads to bike,” as Stuart-Wolff says.
