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Unzen-Amakusa NP, Nagasaki
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After the 1792 disaster and famine, local tradition credits a villager named Rokubee with turning stored sweet-potato flour and yam into noodles. The once-practical food is still enjoyed in broth as a Shimabara specialty.
Fugendake was the peninsula’s highest peak at 1,359 m—until its 1990s eruption built the 1,483 m Heisei Shinzan nearby. Named in 1996, the new dome commemorates both the disaster and the region’s recovery.
Heisei Shinzan did not grow as one smooth lump: observers identified 13 successive lava lobes, from the first on May 20, 1991, to the thirteenth on July 12, 1994. Each bulge changed the dome’s shape.
Researchers drilled diagonally 2,000 m from Unzen’s northern slope to reach the magma conduit that fed the 1991–95 eruption. The conduit rock was only about 200°C—surprisingly cool, likely chilled by circulating hot water.
Fugendake was erupting and sending out lava in 1792, but the catastrophic landslide came from nearby Mount Mayuyama, not Fugendake. Mayuyama’s collapse triggered a tsunami that killed about 15,000 people across Shimabara and Higo.
Fugendake’s 1663 eruption left a hazard that struck the following spring: water burst from the old crater, poured down Akamatsu Valley as a mudflow, and killed more than 30 people downstream.
Above 950 m, the Unzen region has mainland Japan’s westernmost deciduous broadleaf forest. Fugendake’s autumn woods are protected as the national natural monument Fugen-dake Colored Forest.
Fugen Shrine served as a mountain-worship sanctuary and the inner shrine of Onsen Shrine from the Muromachi period. Buried by an eruption in 1991, it was rebuilt near Fugendake’s summit in 2004.
From May 1991 to May 1996, 9,432 pyroclastic flows were recorded as the lava dome repeatedly collapsed. On August 25, 1994, 68 occurred in a single day—a sobering measure of how persistent the danger was.
After the deadly June 3, 1991, flow, officials set Japan’s first legally enforced warning zone inside an inhabited area. The measure restricted entry where people lived and became a landmark in disaster response.
