The 19th-century Scottish novelist and poet Robert Louis Stevenson got it spot on about traveling when he noted that to do so hopefully was a better thing than arriving.
Should you venture forth to Hagi, whatever you may feel about the actual Yamaguchi Prefecture town you encounter, on a fine day there's no way to make the journey there along the coast without experiencing a frisson of excited anticipation.
From my vantage point in the bus from the nearest airport (Hagi-Iwami, in Masuda, Shimane Prefecture), I see white-capped waves of a cobalt-blue Sea of Japan hammering into this out-of-the-way western tip of Honshu, creating a rugged coastline of pine-crowned headlands separated by bays of ocher sand. Linking sparse villages, the road tracks the coastal serrations as swift fishing boats veer out past sea stacks and cliff-edged islands toward Korea. Clusters of cormorants fan their wings out to dry, and since this coast has mercifully escaped pervasive development, they do so upon jagged rocks offshore rather than on dispiriting concrete tetrapods.
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