Hagi sits on a small delta where the sea meets two rivers, and around it you can follow the arc of an extraordinary change. The old castle town, with its mud walls and low-roofed samurai houses, is on one side, and on the other, on the edge of the mudflats, stands a chimney. It is the reverberatory furnace at Ebisugahana, built in the 1850s by the Choshu domain to cast iron cannon in the Western manner, using Dutch books as a guide. The experiment was crude, but it shows how fast the clan was learning, and the furnace, a stump of brick, is now part of the UNESCO listing of Japan's Meiji industrial revolution.
The town's other great site is the school of Yoshida Shoin, a young teacher who taught only for a year or two in the 1850s and was executed in 1859 at the age of twenty-nine. Among his students were men who later led the overthrow of the shogun and built the modern state, including Ito Hirobumi, Japan's first prime minister. The small wooden classroom, in the grounds of the Shoin shrine, is tiny and plain, and the effect is memorable, since it is hard to believe that so much came from so little.
For a rider, Hagi is a pleasant, easy town. The streets in the castle quarter are narrow and lined with walls, often marked with the orange of summer citrus branches leaning over, and there are parking lots at the edge. The ride in from the Sea of Japan coast is gentle, with the surface good and the traffic light, and the Hagi shoreline has a quiet, sandy air that is very different from the busy industrial coasts of the Pacific.
Fuel is plentiful in Hagi, with several stations on the main road. Look for the local pottery, soft in colour and prized by tea masters, and try the fresh squid for which the Sea of Japan is known. Spring brings pleasant weather and autumn the clearest light. In winter, winds from the north can be cold and sharp, with grey skies and some snow.