Nokonoshima Island Park

This guide to Nokonoshima Island Park in Hakata Bay opens in 1953 with a nineteen-year-old named Kubota Kosaku, whose family's sweet potato farm on the island could no longer compete with cheaper mainland fields. Rather than give up the land, he began quietly planting azaleas, camellias and flowering trees in every spare hour, funding it alone for sixteen years before it opened to the public. Stand among the flower beds and you are standing in what was once a struggling potato patch.