Clear the Kagoshima Local Quiz and earn the Kagoshima Local title. Want to know Kagoshima even better, or already confident? The tougher courses are next.
Across Kinko Bay, Sakurajima smolders in plain view of the city, and daily life simply carries on, ash and all. This quiz asks how Kagoshima lives with its volcano: the ferries shuttling to the island, the streetcars, the small adaptations of a city beside an active peak. History runs deep here too, with questions on Saigo Takamori and the Meiji Restoration, the Shimadzu family's Sengan-en garden, and the lost-then-revived glasswork of Satsuma kiriko. Food gets its due as well: kurobuta pork, satsuma-age, and shochu, along with the Tenmonkan district, the Ohara Festival, and a dialect famous for defeating outsiders. Try the practice questions first; they will tell you where you stand.
Q1.Which active volcano rises from Kinko Bay and can be reached by ferry from central Kagoshima City?
Sakurajima
Mount Fuji
Mount Aso
Mount Kaimon
Reveal the correct answer
Correct answerSakurajima
Sakurajima is the active volcano rising in Kinko Bay directly across from downtown Kagoshima. It still trails smoke, and residents live in company with its ashfall. City-run ferries shuttle between the urban waterfront and the volcano's port — less a sight to visit than a part of daily life.
Q2.The garden Sengan-en, which looks out across Kinko Bay toward Sakurajima, was built in the Edo period as a villa for which daimyo family?
The Maeda family
The Date family
The Shimazu family
The Mori family
Reveal the correct answer
Correct answerThe Shimazu family
Sengan-en is the daimyo garden built as a villa of the Shimazu, lords of Satsuma, and a nationally designated Place of Scenic Beauty. Commanding Kinko Bay and Sakurajima, it served the clan as a kind of guesthouse — and in the Bakumatsu era, modernization itself began next door.
Q3.Which figure from the Satsuma domain, active during the Meiji Restoration, led the Satsuma Rebellion (Seinan War) in Kagoshima in 1877?
Saigo Takamori
Sakamoto Ryoma
Katsu Kaishu
Ito Hirobumi
Reveal the correct answer
Correct answerSaigo Takamori
Saigo Takamori, samurai and statesman of Satsuma, was a chief architect of the Meiji Restoration. Leaving the new government, he returned home and in 1877 raised the Satsuma Rebellion, the largest civil war of the Meiji era. Sites connected to it remain scattered across Kagoshima today.
Q4.Along with Saigo Takamori, which fellow Kagoshima-born statesman became a central figure in the new Meiji government?
Okubo Toshimichi
Sakamoto Ryoma
Katsu Kaishu
Iwakura Tomomi
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Correct answerOkubo Toshimichi
Okubo Toshimichi grew up in the same castle-town neighborhood as Saigo Takamori and went on to steer the young Meiji state. In 1878, the year after Saigo fell in the rebellion, Okubo was assassinated in Tokyo. Two boys from one street divided the Restoration's light and shadow.
Q5.In the "borrowed scenery" (shakkei) design of Sengan-en, the celebrated Shimazu-clan garden, what serves as the artificial hill and the pond, respectively?
Mt. Taga and the Kotsuki River
Mt. Shiroyama and the Inari River
Iso hill and the waters off Tenpozan
Sakurajima and Kinko Bay
Hint: An active volcano seen across the bay
Reveal the correct answer
Correct answerSakurajima and Kinko Bay
Sengan-en is a borrowed-scenery garden on the grandest scale, treating Sakurajima as its artificial hill and Kinko Bay as its pond, as the saying goes. Built in 1658 as a villa by Shimazu Mitsuhisa, the 19th head of the clan, its genius is to annex the landscape itself.
